Setting the record straight about Ty Cobb

One hundred years ago, in 1916, Ty Cobb enjoyed a typically spectacular season for the Detroit Tigers—in 145 games, he had 542 at-bats, scored 113 runs (first in the American League), had 201 hits (including 31 doubles, 10 triples and 5 home runs), 68 RBIs, 68 stolen bases (first in the AL) and batted .371. It was the first time Cobb had not led the AL in batting since 1906, and he would be back on top the next three years. A left-handed batter and right-handed thrower, he retired in 1928 with 90 records—some of which still stand. Cobb, who played mostly in center field, stood 6′1″ and weighed 175 pounds, so he was fairly big for his time. He ran well, as indicated by his 897 career stolen bases.

When the Baseball Hall of Fame got started in 1936, he was almost unanimously (222 votes out of 226) inducted. The other three honorees were Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson and the immortal Babe Ruth. Cobb and Ruth had a testy relationship on and off the diamond. “He’s the most competitive man I’ve ever seen,” Ruth said. “He wants to beat you every day of the week and twice on Sundays.” That Ty Cobb played hard—OK, very hard—and was consumed with winning is agreed upon by baseball historians. It must have gnawed at him that the Tigers (as with the Philadelphia A’s his last two years) never won the World Series.

Cobb’s baseball achievements notwithstanding, one would be hard pressed to name an athlete with a worse reputation. How is he generally characterized? As a racist, first of all. According to received wisdom, this man who hailed from rural Georgia—born just 21 years after the conclusion of the Civil War—hated black people with a burning passion. He was an alcoholic and a gun-wielding misanthrope who had numerous violent confrontations with opponents, teammates, umpires, groundskeepers, waitresses, policemen, customs officials and whoever else may have upset him. Cobb was “an embarrassment to the game” according to Ken Burns’ 1994 Emmy Award-winning documentary, Baseball. A movie of the same year entitled Cobb, featuring Tommy Lee Jones, was brutal. Jones, a native of Texas and graduate of Harvard University, should be ashamed of his role in a project that took great liberties with the truth. Better yet, Tommy Lee, go down to Georgia and make a sincere apology to the people at the Ty Cobb Educational Foundation, which gives out scholarships worth $700,000 every year. Students of all races benefit.

The standard portrayal of Cobb is to a large extent false. While he fought often and had a prickly personality, he was actually anomalous for a baseball player in the early part of the 20th century. He was quite intelligent and read books without pictures. When the Tigers went out of town, he often visited museums, concert halls and historical sites. Cobb was derided in the locker room for being a genteel aristocrat. He kept a close eye on the stock market, invested wisely (Coca-Cola and General Motors, especially) and amassed $12 million. Cobb as a racist is also way overstated. His views moderated over time, and when Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball in 1947, Cobb approved and spoke highly of the Dodgers’ new player. He was also a big fan of Willie Mays. 

How to explain the disparity between reality and long-held negative perceptions? Possibly the biggest mistake Cobb ever made was hiring Al Stump to ghostwrite his autobiography (My Life in Baseball: The True Record) in 1960, a year before his death. That book was a rather typical self-justifying account. As soon as Cobb was dead and buried, Stump did a 180 in an article in True magazine which described him in the very worst terms. Nobody, it seems, bothered to check the veracity of his accusations, and for a half-century Cobb’s reputation was lower than the belly of a cockroach. Some people even said he should be thrown out of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

(This is somewhat off-topic, but Stump was later proven to have stolen many artifacts from Cobb's home in Lake Tahoe, Nevada and put them up for auction. He also forged diaries allegedly written by Cobb.)

Charles Alexander (1984) and Richard Bak (1994) wrote bios of Cobb which more or less regurgitated what Stump had written. They consciously told dubious tales about Cobb, further weaving them into baseball history.

When Comerica Park opened in downtown Detroit in 2000, six statues of the franchise’s greatest players were erected outside the stadium—Hal Newhouser, Al Kaline, Willie Horton, Charlie Gehringer, Hank Greenberg and Cobb. The statue of Horton, the only black member of that group, happened to be next to Cobb’s, and the media praised him for not objecting.

It makes a good story to say Cobb was the devil in baseball spikes. Paint the Tigers’ star in broad strokes and the heck with context and nuance. In fact, the hyperbolic portrayal of Cobb had been eroding for a while. I saw some articles on the Internet which showed there was a lot more to the Georgia Peach than we had been told. The tide has turned. Modern baseball historians, some of them writing in peer-reviewed academic journals, have delved deeply into the original sources and disproved many of the fabrications about him. Ever heard of the Society for American Baseball Research? Let's just say Al Stump would have no credibility there.

In 2015, two books were published—Ty Cobb / A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen and War on the Basepaths / The Definitive Biography of Ty Cobb by Tim Hornbaker. They come to almost identical conclusions, showing beyond doubt that Cobb was the victim of an egregious and long-running smear campaign. Leerhsen and Hornbraker pushed aside the myths about Cobb and showed him as he was: no saint, for sure, but not the ogre we thought we knew.

The grossly unfair treatment of Cobb, most of all his supposed racist beliefs and actions, fit well in the zeitgeist of the 1960s and beyond. A European-American man, born and raised in the Deep South, probably an unreconstructed Rebel, who liked nothing more than to fight with blacks and keep them in their place: this caricature was handy, with the civil rights movement, black power and “affirmative action” going on. Who, under such circumstances, would come to Cobb's defense?

I am gratified that we now have a clear-eyed view of Ty Cobb, perhaps the greatest baseball player who ever lived. Again, I am not denying that he had his faults because he most certainly did. But the lies and misrepresentations about him were so much night soil, something that has been taken and unceremoniously disposed of. This correction was long overdue.