The two things everyone knows about Ty Cobb are that he was a phenomenal baseball player and that he was the worst racist ever to play the game. But one of these things is mostly wrong. Cobb, the first player voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the holder of more than 90 records upon his retirement and still the pace-setter with a .366 lifetime batting average, could be rude, but not nearly as nasty as you think. And far from being the most notorious racist in baseball history, he was an early and vocal supporter of integrating the big leagues.
In his new biography, “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” (Simon & Schuster), Charles Leerhsen opens with a comedy routine that details some of the many myths about the Detroit Tigers superstar. Was he a wife-beater? “He was an everything beater,” offered comic Jim Norton. “A horrible racist. A Demerol addict . . . in 1907 Cobb fought a black groundskeeper . . . and ended up choking the man’s wife when she intervened. On several occasions he brutally pistol-whipped African-American men whose only offense was to share a sidewalk with him,” wrote a biographer of Hall of Famer Tris Speaker.
In Ken Burns’ “Baseball,” Cobb is called “an embarrassment to the game.” Most notoriously, we all know that Cobb stabbed a black waiter in Cleveland and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Except none of these allegations is true.
Continue Reading at the NY Post…
See also: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/43506-ty-cobb-was-not-a-racist
