The truth and Ty Cobb

The conversation started something like this, with me talking as men assembled for the beginning of yet another track practice last week. “Hey guys! I’m reading this really interesting book, a biography of Ty Cobb!” Usually, such proclamations are met with muffled indifference. Or worse, complete silence, with heads buried in their respective phones -- looking up race results or watching workout videos or otherwise maintaining steadfast disinterest in my interest. Hey, I don’t take it personally. My “entertainment” choices range from (mostly boring) audiobooks to (mostly boring) podcasts – alert readers of this blog already know that! But this time? Someone actually commented – a senior member of the team who, from what I recall, is not even much of a baseball fan. Said he: “Ooooh. Coach. Ty Cobb? Racist! Really bad guy. Killed people. Racist, right?” He made a point to stress the “racist” part. I smiled and said no … and that’s what I loved so much about “A Terrible Beauty,” the incredibly well-written and well-reported biography by Charles Leerhsen. This book, which is only a few years old, debunks many of the Ty Cobb myths. In the process, Leerhsen completely trashes previous Ty Cobb biographers and historians – specifically Al Stump, the biographer most responsible for painting this mostly inaccurate picture of perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time.

Now look: Leerhsen doesn’t transform the evil legend of Ty Cobb into a saintly figure – a la, his contemporary from the Dead Ball era, the great Christy Mathewson, Matty, who was dubbed (among many other glowing nicknames) the Christian Gentleman. No. Not at all. After reading this book, and enjoying every minute of it (books about the Dead Ball era of early 20^th century baseball are a great favorite of mine), I took away that Cobb had a rather expansive mean streak. Cobb was quick tempered. Cobb was rude. Cobb got into a lot of fights – side note, so did most competitive men back in those days. Cobb played the game hard, played it aggressively, and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way (on and off the field). But was Cobb a racist? By his words and his deeds and his surprisingly enlightened southern lineage, there is no trace of that. Did Cobb kill people in fits of rage? Uh, no. There is absolutely zero evidence of that, anywhere. Did Cobb intentionally spike players on the base paths and around the bases? Intentionally? No. Did he sharpen his spikes to intentionally hurt people? No. Cobb was kind to autograph seekers, especially children. Cobb wrote long and thoughtful letters to all fans who corresponded with him. Cobb was revered by most fans much of the time, even by umpires with whom he bitterly feuded. Cobb was a doting father, and he was also tough on his children, and in his later days, he drank too much and had strained relations with his family. In other words? Cobb was a complicated man. He was human. Just like the rest of us. He also happened to be among the greatest players who ever lived, and was the first man elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, a point of pride for him right up until his death.

Cobb’s was a unique, highly entertaining life – filled with myriad ups and downs. Leerhsen weaves the narrative so well that you just want to keep going and going to find out what happened – even though, if you are a baseball fan, you kind of know what happened! But there were many twists and turns of which I was not aware. For example: I had no idea that Cobb, a career-long Detroit Tigers player, finished his career with two years on the Philadelphia Athletics, playing for the legendary manager Connie Mack. The book reads like many, many great baseball biographies, with one notable exception. Toward the end of the book, Leerhsen summarizes his extensive research by laying waste to the despicable hatchet job by Al Stump, which is largely responsible for Cobb’s still famously tarnished (if mostly false) reputation. It’s an oft-cited cliché to say, “well, so-and-so should be in the Hall of Fame, if a mean racist like Ty Cobb is in there.'' Again, Cobb was nowhere near as evil as he has been portrayed and his legacy is forever tarnished as a result. Leerhsen tries to address this toward the latter stages of the book.

Here’s some of what Leerhsen wrote about Stump’s fictitious portrayals of Ty Cobb:  Most of what he wrote wasn’t the truth. The degree to which his writing had been accepted … had nothing to do with its dependability. He got both the finer details and the broader strokes wrong, and largely on purpose for the sake of a dramatic, and thus more marketable, story.

And then, Leerhsen said this, which to me is downright poetic genius: The experience taught me a lesson about how assumptions can shape our thinking, and hence our lives. Just because you’ve heard something a thousand times doesn’t mean it’s true. … When the culture has the mind to convict someone, facts are like gnats; annoyances to be swatted away.

Oh gosh. Doesn’t this sound familiar? The book was published in 2015, just around the time when terms like “Fake News” and the incessant echo chambers of our media outlets really ramped up. “Versions of the truth” are generally in the eyes of the beholder, reader, listener or viewer. “Confirmation bias” is rampant. Ty Cobb is a racist! Ty Cobb killed people! If you are interested in a more nuanced version of the truth – as in, the actual, fact-based truth about the complicated legacy of Ty Cobb, read Leerhsen’s book. We’d all do well to apply the lessons of Leerhsen’s reporting and perspective to other areas of public discourse.