In March of 1994 we watched the filming of a scene from the Ron Shelton movie about Ty Cobb at Rickwood Field with Tommy Lee Jones playing the title role. The script was based on a magazine article by a man named Al Stump. In this major revisionist biography of Ty Cobb, the author says that whole thing, article and movie, is pure fiction. Mr. Stump had a habit of disguising fiction as fact.
Ty Cobb was not the meanest and most hated man in baseball. He had his bad qualities as we all do, but he was not the monster he's been made out to be over the decades. Sharpening his spikes and trying to hurt opposing players with them? Not so according to this author.
He got into his share of fights on the diamond, but so did lots of players during Cobb's era. He had a hair-trigger temper, but so what? If opposing players didn't like him, it was probably because he was such a fierce competitor.
Before I go on, here is something I want to say. I grew up collecting baseball cards and memorizing statistics, for baseball of all the sports is a game of statistics. Two that always stuck in mind are that Cobb's lifetime average was .367 and he had 4.191 hits. Somewhere in the last few years some statistical do-gooder did some research and took some hits and average away from Cobb. This book shows an average of .366 and 4189 hits. I refuse to accept this! I'm sticking with the original numbers.
In this book I learned that he tried to tutor Joe DiMaggio in his early years. He tried to help Mantle. He criticized Ted Williams for always trying to pull the ball and not hit to left field. Boo!
He was a shrewd business man as he bought original GM and Coca-Cola stock. Ty Cobb was certainly a multimillionaire.
The book makes me see that Cobb was a "push" hitter. He tried to hit balls over the infield but did not "swing for the fences." This was dead ball, small ball baseball. that changed when the ball was made livelier and a player named Babe Ruth came along. By the 20's Cobb's style of baseball was in decline. He would hold the bat spreading his hands and then adjusting. He would be laughed at today.
Billy Martin and Ty Cobb would have been a great combo. They both played and taught the same brand of baseball. Cobb would drive other teams crazy when on the base paths. He would pressure the other team into making mistakes. He stole 892 bases in his career, but according to this author, was not so exceedingly fast---he did it as much by studying pitchers and getting a good jump. Ty Cobb was the ultimate competitor in the dead ball era of small ball.
The reader appreciates that Cobb was a keen student of the game, that he was so good at spotting and exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents, and that he could be a trickster. I do not particularly like the latter. One technique was to put dirt on a catcher's foot to distract him. That is bush in my opinion. Do pressure and agitate the opponent like Billy Martin, but not juvenile tricks to take the place of out performing your opponent in the field.
Will this book rehabilitate Cobb's image? Only to those who read the book.
There are other Ty Cobb books out there, but I think I'm done with this one. The subject is exhaustible.
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