Ty Cobb

Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen, 404 pages

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with baseball history knows Ty Cobb.  Although some of his career records have been surpassed in the century since he retired - stolen bases by Lou Brock in 1977, hits by Pete Rose in 1985, runs by Rickey Henderson in 2001 - he continues to hold the records for highest career batting average and most times stealing home, neither of which is likely to fall barring major structural changes to the game itself.  Not only was he one of the best players of all time, Cobb was baseball's biggest star as the sport transitioned from being a somewhat disreputable entertainment into the national pastime.  When the Baseball Hall of Fame was established in 1936, he finished first in the balloting, beating out even Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Walter Johnson.

Cobb's fame, however, has long been eclipsed by his notoriety.  Everyone knows that Cobb was prone to murderous rages - it's said he once beat a man to death with a baseball bat, then used the same bat to hit a home run the next day.  Everyone knows he was a virulent racist - it's said he would pistol whip black men who dared presume to share the same sidewalk with him.  Everyone knows he reveled in slicing up other players with his cleats while sliding into base - it's said he would ostentatiously sharpen his spikes before and during games.

Except, as Charles Leerhsen documents, little of this is true.  Cobb was indeed a violent man, but less so than many ballplayers in an era when at least one umpire carried a knife under his uniform for personal protection, and he was certainly no psychopath.  While he had many attitudes typical of a Southerner during the reign of Jim Crow, in 1952 - a time when many Southern ballplayers like Enos Slaughter were outspoken opponents of integration - he declared that "the Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly."  Despite using mind games, trickery, and intimidation to give him an edge on the field, Cobb was generally well liked, with an unpredictable generosity that often surprised the recipient - indeed, he financially supported several of his former teammates in their later years.

As Leerhsen tells it, Cobb was "a relentless finder of fists that he could jam his chin against", 

but was also a surprisingly sensitive man familiar with trial and tragedy, who pursued a career in baseball at a time when that was akin to joining the circus, whose father (a Georgia state senator) was shot and killed by his mother under mysterious circumstances, who was bullied so mercilessly by his teammates during his second year in the majors that he suffered a nervous breakdown, who ultimately learned not only to live with but to thrive on adversity, producing the kind of sustained excellence that is the hallmark of baseball greatness.  

Meanwhile, how the myth of Ty Cobb as monster - "Jack the Ripper in baseball flannels" - became universally accepted is a story almost as interesting as his life, a combination of folklore, rumor, and exaggeration, fed by the ambition and greed of sportswriter Al Stump, who co-wrote Cobb's autobiography, then, in one of the greatest acts of character assassination in history, spent decades inventing scandalous stories to sell to a credulous public.