Game 67: Yankees (Happ) at White Sox (Nova)

I doubt that you know very much about Ty Cobb. There have always been and still are plenty of unsavory characters who nevertheless have been effective baseball players. The Yankees have one right now in Aroldis Chapman.

All I am saying is that he, like Honus Wagner or Tris Speaker or other stars of that era, would have had the ability to adjust their baseball-playing skills to a different age. Cobb's racial attitudes were not markedly out of line for the time and place he was born. Had you been born in Banks County Georgia in the 1880s, it is highly unlikely you would hold the identical views you hold today.

Cobb was an angry and violent man. He was also quite intelligent and extremely competitive with a well-developed sense of self-interest. He was the kind of person who would have come out ahead in any era. I don't think he was an especially admirable person, even within the context of his time. But neither was he the one-dimensional cartoon villain crafted by film makers and intellectually lazy writers.

Yes. It’s also fair to believe that Cobb would have adjusted his thinking and lifestyle to a more modern tune. There are still plenty of racists and even more that retain old prejudices in the world today. How and where people are reared still had a profound affect...Playing sports exposes people to other races and cultures and those with social intellect learn to at least adjust their behavior of not to actually learn a better way...

First of all, I already said that Cobb was violence-prone.  He had many more fights with whites than with blacks.  He was very open-minded on that score.  It was an era when lots of disputes were settled with fists.  Ernest Hemingway was in way more fights than Ty Cobb.  And some of those even involved baseball players (I'll let you look that up.)

Cobb was the principal financial backer of the Cobb Memorial Hospital in Royston, GA.  It served a largely black area.  Cobb personally hired Dr. JB Gilbert, a black surgeon, in pre-integration Georgia.  He later became head of the hospital's surgery staff, serving both white and black patients.  Cobb was a frequent visitor to the Gilbert house and was fondly remembered after his death by Gilbert's daughter.

Cobb had a long-time black employee named Alex Rivers.  Rivers named his first son after Ty Cobb.

Cobb was good friends with Happy Chandler, the former KY Senator who was baseball commissioner when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.  Cobb supported the right of black ballplayers to play in the majors, albeit in the language of his time.  Not known for a charitable attitude toward later generations of baseball, he said in the early 1950s that Willie Mays was the only player he would pay to watch play.

I'm not saying this to promote the idea that Ty Cobb was a sweet and loving man.  He wasn't.  He was combative, capable of being nasty and made more than his share of enemies in baseball.  But the concept of him being the embodiment of all that is bad in human nature is ridiculous.  It started with a hack biographer, Al Stump, in the early 60s.  Stump had been banished from publications like "Sports Illustrated" and "TV Guide" because of his lackadaisical attitude toward the facts.  Cobb was in the process of suing Stump when Cobb died in 1961.  Stump's half-assed assertions were picked up by the guy who made the movie about Cobb, which is probably where most people today get their ideas about him.

Charles Leerhsen, a much better writer than Stump, covered a lot of this ground in his book "A Terrible Beauty" on Cobb a few years ago.

Again, I'm not Ty Cobb's posthumous lawyer.  He sure isn't on my short list of favorite athletes.  It's just that simplistic tropes about a multi-faceted human being strike me as being very unfair.