Hero as Villain

“I drove him there,” Stump writes, 

It is nicely melodramatic stuff, but there is a problem. As Charles Leerhsen writes in Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, “It didn’t snow that day in Royston or for hundreds of miles around.” That might have been the least of Stump’s assaults on the truth and Cobb’s reputation. But like so many other slanders, it has stood, until now, because it fits the narrative of Cobb as a violent, racist near-psychopath. He may have been the greatest pure hitter in the history of baseball and a driven, complicated man. But that is somehow insufficient.  

So with the help of writers like Stump, there grew the legend of Cobb the Terrible, about whom “everyone knows” so many things. For instance, that “he killed as many as three people,” as Ron Shelton, who directed the film Cobb (1994), told Leerhsen, who pressed him for details and documentation. The best Shelton could come up with was, “All this is well known.” 

Yes, of course. And everyone also “knows” how Cobb, in his prime, would file the spikes on his shoes down to a wicked edge, the better to cut up opposing infielders who tried to protect the bag when he was going for the steal.

This one—the sharpened spikes—was part of the lore when Cobb was still playing, and (as Leerhsen writes) it was debunked even then by the men Cobb was supposedly trying to slice up with his feet. Joe Tinker, of the famous Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double-play triad, “said in 1910 that he was tired of hearing about Cobb ‘cutting down infielders while getting around the bases. Why didn’t he spike me when he had the chance in the world championship series?’ ” 

In going after this commonplace slander, Leerhsen takes the reader back to the time of a different kind of baseball. In the deadball era, the home run was an anomaly: The point was not to swing hard and trot around the bases, but to get on one—and then to get around them. Bunting and base-running were among the finer arts of the game, and Cobb, who still has the highest lifetime batting average in the history of baseball, also held for many years the record for stolen bases.

But because he was Ty Cobb, the legend of the sharpened spikes grew and overshadowed this accomplishment. The truth of his ability on the base paths was not so drearily malevolent. What made Cobb such a threat to steal was a combination of ability and intensity. He was fast, and he made a study of opposing pitchers, looking for the slightest “tell” before a pickoff attempt. He worked out a repertoire of nine different slides so that he could get under a tag, or around it, or, when necessary, through it.  

He was an aggressive base-runner, to be sure, and also crafty. He stole home a record 54 times, something you almost never see in the modern game. It is still thrilling, all these years later, to imagine Cobb on third in a close game and what that would do to the opposing pitcher’s nerves, something Cobb called creating “mental hazard.”

So he was tough. And he fought and brawled. This was not uncommon among ballplayers in those days. But Cobb may have been in more than his share of fistfights, some of which went way beyond a few shots to the jaw. The temper and the fistfights might have been permitted a lesser player, but not Cobb. According to legend, he became not just a hot-tempered brawler but a racist bully and killer.

Leerhsen treats that element of the dark legend with special, and admirable, care. Ty Cobb was born in Georgia slightly more than two decades after the Civil War ended, denying him the presumption of innocence on racial matters. This, Leerhsen writes, despite the fact that his father, an educator and “something of a public intellectual,” advocated what were, at the time, progressive policies regarding the races. His son, then, did not grow up in a home of redneck haters. 

Cobb, for his part, was early and forceful in his support of Jackie Robinson when Robinson broke the color barrier. During his playing days, Cobb treated a young African-American boy who was a kind of locker-room gofer with kindness—including letting the kid ride secretly with him on segregated trains and bunk with him in segregated hotels. 

But the narrative demanded that, being from Georgia, Cobb would necessarily be a foaming-at-the-mouth racist. The demand went so far that one writer simply made Cobb’s antagonists in one of his more infamous brawls into African Americans, when the newspaper accounts made no mention of their race. Still, the writer claimed he had “contemporary accounts” to back him up. Charles Leerhsen, when he could find none, checked census documents that listed one of Cobb’s antagonists as “white.” The legend of that brawl grew to the point that Cobb was said to have stabbed one of the men to death—making that man, perhaps, one of the three Cobb was “known” to have killed.

The line immortalized in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has it this way: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The legend of Ty Cobb will probably always eclipse the fact. It makes better copy. But Charles Leerhsen has done baseball aficionados a great mercy by bringing to life Ty Cobb, the man and the ballplayer—warts and all, some might say. The warts are ugly, but not ugly enough to thoroughly disfigure or conceal the ballplayer.  

And even more, Leerhsen summons up the days when baseball was young and innocent and, one thinks, filled with a kind of raw vitality that is missing today. There are passages in this book that make the game back then seem like so much more fun. Try to imagine the manager of some team today going out to the coaching box to “blow a tin whistle, shake a rubber snake, or put down a parade of windup toys.” That same manager, “as part of his attempt to distract the easily distractible southpaw Rube Waddell .  .  . briefly shared his coaching box with a dog.”

They don’t make them like that—or like Cobb—anymore. And the real Cobb is more compelling than the one of legend and film. 

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.