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We live in a time when villains never seem to get their comeuppance. So the recent news that Major League Baseball had re-crunched its trove of statistics and taken the legendary Ty Cobb down a notch from first to second place among all-time batting champs had many sports fans celebrating. Cobb, who played mostly for the Detroit Tigers from 1905 to 1928, was a pioneering superstar who had an astounding lifetime batting average of .367, a number that was until recently considered unsurpassable. He was also the most exciting player of his era, once stealing second, third and home on three consecutive pitches and on another occasion turning a squibbler back to the pitcher into an inside the park home run.
But the Georgia Peach, as he was known in his day, also owns a reputation as a thoroughly despicable human being (it was said that he sharpened his spikes and kept them high when sliding into opposing infielders) and, most of all, a virulent racist. Rumor had it that he'd once stabbed a Black hotel clerk whose attitude he didn't fancy. A baseball historian wrote that Cobb "brutally pistol whipped African-American men" he saw on the street. Cobb was insulted in the movie Field of Dreams ("No one liked that son of a bitch," one character said), depicted as a sexual predator in the 1995 biopic Cobb starring Tommy Lee Jones, and decried in the Ken Burns documentary Baseball as "an embarrassment to the game." In the long history of America's National Pastime, it's safe to say that no player has been more despised.
But it wasn't just Cobb's demotion that had fans popping champagne corks; the beauty part was how it came about. Cobb took a tumble because MLB finally factored in numbers from the Negro Leagues, which existed mostly before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier in 1947. The new name atop the lifetime batting average rankings: Josh Gibson, another son of Georgia but a Black man who'd excelled on teams like the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays, hitting .373 over his 16-year career. Across the internet and at many sports bars too, people gloated over the sweet justice of a white supremacist getting bypassed by the grandson of a slave, even if the gloaters weren't overly woke themselves. "Ty Cobb racist ass records wiped outta 1st place," someone named android gleefully tweeted last week, speaking for many.
I have to raise my hand here, though. As someone who spent more than three years researching the man for a biography, I see one slight problem with this deeply satisfying turn of events: the Ty Cobb of legend never existed. That character is based on a myth that didn't get going until after his death in 1961. Believe me, this was as much a shock to me as it has been to others, for I was grimly determined to find the ogre I'd promised to deliver in the proposal that I wrote for my publisher. But as I went through thousands of newspaper and magazine clippings, legal documents and personal letters, as I traveled the country to interview members of his family and others who had known him, I kept stumbling upon inconvenient truths.
For example, if Cobb was such a hated man, a guy who drew blood with his baseball shoes, why did the Chicago White Sox once have a ceremony at home plate at which they presented him with a trophy for being the most popular out-of-town player? And why when the Tigers came to town did the brilliant Chicago sportswriter Ring Lardner buy seats within shouting distance of him in right field so he could banter with the Peach? Because Cobb was Lardner's favorite player, the rare athlete he felt could be his friend. It was said at the time that Cobb spiked people, but I could find only one instance of a player saying that—and Cobb himself got so tired of the slander that in 1910 he wrote to the president of the league suggesting players be required to dull their spikes with a file.
As for the charges of racism, some, like Cobb's supposed habit of pistol-whipping Black pedestrians, were unsubstantiated and highly implausible on their face. Other stories involving Cobb and race failed to survive fact-checking. A 1984 biography of Cobb certified the conventional wisdom that Cobb had been involved in physical fights with a nightwatchman, a butcher and that hotel employee, all of whom were Black. But after checking census reports and birth certificates I found that in fact all three were white men. The author's explanation to me was, "I went with the best information I had at the time."
But what about Cobb's Southern roots? How could someone born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? What I found with my research was that Cobb came from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his Black constituents and once broke up a lynch mob.
Cobb himself was never asked about segregation until 1952, when the Texas League was finally allowing Black players and the Sporting News asked him what he thought. "The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly," he said. "The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and who's to say he has not?" By that time he had attended many Negro League games, sometimes throwing out the first ball and sitting in the dugout with the players. He also said that Willie Mays was the only modern-day player he'd pay to see and that Roy Campanella was the player who reminded him most of himself.
The Cobb who emerged from my research was, like most of us, a highly imperfect person—oversensitive and too quick to dismiss those who didn't strive for excellence with his sometimes frightening zeal. He was beloved by some players—his fellow Hall of Famer George Sisler said, "The greatness of Ty Cobb was something that had to be seen—and to see him was to remember him forever"—and disliked by others, just as Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were, sometimes out of jealousy. When he died, at age 74, he was eulogized respectfully as an aggressive competitor who deserved the distinction of getting the most votes in the first class inducted into the Hall of Fame. No one called him a bigot or alluded to a dark side. So how did we get from there to Field of Dreams?
Cobb's bad reputation owes its origins not to anything he ever said or did but to a West Coast sportswriter named Al Stump. Stump ghostwrote Cobb's 1961 autobiography, My Life in Baseball, a book that Cobb disliked intensely and whose publication he was trying to stop at the time of his death. The book wasn't defamatory but it contained episodes invented by Stump and was wrong about dates, names and numbers. It barely made a ripple when it appeared—but a piece Stump wrote soon afterward for a popular barbershop magazine called True, a seamy tell-all about his time working with Cobb on their book, caused a sensation.
In the largely false True story, Stump depicted Cobb as a crazy drunk who drove around his Lake Tahoe neighborhood waving a gun, cursed at his doctors, flung drinks at bartenders and woke up a bank president in the middle of the night—in person, with a gun—to stop a $5 check. Everyone in baseball had hated Cobb, Stump claimed, adding that only three people went to his funeral. It didn't matter than Stump's article didn't provide names or places, had only anonymous sources or that after Cobb's family announced that his funeral would be private thousands had shown up anyway. People thrilled to the tale of the godawful Cobb and when dozens of sportswriters rushed to Cobb's defense they succeeded only in disseminating and amplifying the titillating stories.
After that Cobb's reputation was in the hands of the masses—who retold and freely embroidered on his legend. Over the decades, repetition became truth. Instead of being seen as a specific human being, he became a kind of blank canvas on which people could paint a portrait of a miscreant, being as inventive as they pleased. It was fascinating to imagine a racist psycho at large in the major leagues. The bad Cobb—reiterated and further fictionalized by Stump in a 1985 book called Cobb—was someone they could shake their head at, denounce, and feel superior to. Spinning stories in a way that made Cobb look immoral was an artful way of saying, "I am not a racist because I reject this man who is." Cultures change as values change, wars are waged and the harvest waxes and wanes, but a villain who inspires self-congratulation makes for one hell of a tenacious myth.
My book, called Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, became a New York Times bestseller, won awards and, judging from the positive reviews and internet chatter, is slowly but surely changing minds. But has the truth overtaken Stump's delicious lies? Judging by the cheer that went up when Josh Gibson eclipsed Cobb, the answer would appear to be alas, no, not yet.
Charles Leerhsen is also the author of Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, and Butch Cassidy: The Story of an American Outlaw, in addition to other works. He is a former Sports Illustrated Editor.
