Changing the Narrative for Ty Cobb and Dizzy Dean
Baseball has a history of tearing down its own
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . Ty Cobb not only owns the highest batting average in the history of Major League Baseball (.366), he also led his league in hits eight times, the most any hitter has led his league. Ichiro Suzuki and Pete Rose each led their respective league in hits seven times.
Leading Off
Ty Cobb, the Power of Narrative, and Reputation Repair
By: W.H. Johnson
Death anniversaries are rarely discussed, and certainly not highlighted, in routine, conventional social discourse. The very nature of the topic is unsettling to some, and the value in “looking backward” at a life previously lived is questionable to many more. That stipulated, within the Baseball community, today (July 17, 2023) marks the 62nd anniversary of the passing of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, and it is the memory of his life – both the public myths and the private realities – that deserves to be periodically revisited.
Resonant narratives about particular players are intellectual catnip to many pundits. Barry Bonds was a cheater. So was Roger Clemens. Gabe Kapler is a woke activist. Colin Kaepernick…well, that’s a football problem. But the list goes on and on, with public (usually incompletely informed) perceptions reinforcing themselves over months and years and through articles and books until they become unquestioned truth. This is not, however, a new phenomenon in baseball. This has been occurring for as long as there have been star players.
In the historiography, the entire written account, of Ty Cobb, there are more than twenty book-length biographies and an array of news and journal articles and book chapters about him that have been written over the decades, each seeking to illuminate some corner of the Hall-of-Famer’s life. And, of course, there is the 1994 movie “Cobb”, largely based on the version of his life told in Al Stump’s book Cobb: A Biography. Stump had collaborated with Cobb on the latter’s autobiography, but waited until after the player died before releasing the much more colorful – embellished - version that fueled the film.
The books about Cobb range from autobiography to family memoir (e.g. Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up with My Grandfather by Herschel Cobb in 2013) to hatchet job to more balanced treatments like those relatively recent offerings by Tim Hornbaker and Charles Leerhsen. The point of this reflection, however, doesn’t center on whether Cobb was a complete jerk or just a man of his age, one with incredible baseball skills, but rather on the nature of reputation.
Depending on when the books were published, the sundry biographers share a general opinion of Cobb. In books written before 1960, the overarching theme is respectful if not awestruck. Titles like the 1924 Our Ty: Ty Cobb’s Life Story or the 1928 Ty Cobb: The Idol of Fandom, and the 1952 The Story of Ty Cobb: Baseball’s Greatest Player, seem like arguments for Cobb’s greatness.
In 1961, after Stump’s Cobb: A Biography, the tone changed. For the next four decades, there were six books about Cobb’s life, and they each attempted to reconcile the player’s on-field accomplishments with the persona that Stump claimed to have survived. Articles about Cobb assaulting particular individuals have been recounted for over a century, and a few of the stories even appear in a 1985 elementary reader about the man. Indoctrination began early.
Between 2001 and 2015, eight more biographies or memoirs about him hit the bookstores, each seeking to solve the puzzle that was Ty Cobb. Leersen’s investigation (Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty) supports a much different interpretation than Stump’s, one far more subtle and nuanced than the story that has been retold over the intervening decades since Cobb played. Recent biographies flex a natural, modern skepticism about the pre-1960 hagiographies, as well as of Stump’s exaggerations, but there can never be a truly complete accounting of Cobb’s life. He has been dead too long, and there are no new sources.
Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean, who also died on this day (1974), suffered a similar popular reputation, that of a Southern, country rube who could also throw a baseball through a brick wall. After his death, as more Negro League alumni were inducted into Cooperstown, it became clear that Dean was far more astute than he’d let on in life.
Not only was he largely unbiased in terms of racial matters, but he actively sought to barnstorm with the Black players and teams for the actual baseball value. Most have heard of the (true) story of the 1934 World Series, in which Dean was hit in the head with a thrown baseball while breaking up a double play. Later, he reportedly said, “They X-rayed my head and found nothing.” The press had a field day with that one, and for years after Dean developed a public persona that capitalized on the perception. But it was just that, a constantly reinforced notion that was not necessarily grounded in Dean’s true nature. That same narrative vise made Yogi Berra out to be a simple savant for years. Only recently are we finally becoming, collectively, aware of the catcher’s intelligence, courage, and character.
As was the fate of Cobb, Dean, Berra, and Casey Stengel, among many, we see similar narrative abuse in our almost-daily social media interactions. Once a story or a version of a player’s behavior or character (PED use, political agendas, or somesuch) gets traction in the respective media, it is immediately and increasingly difficult to correct the errors and reset the broader audience’s collective perception.
That is the value of remembering Cobb and Dean on the anniversary of their deaths. Those of us over the age of 40 likely spent part of our baseball youth (usually during the winter) reading stories of the players’ flaws, of the blemishes on their life stories that somehow diminished their baseball accomplishments. Today, many more players are subject to similar reputation dissection. It is the job of each of us that care about the game to remain as objective as possible and to prevent myths from disguising themselves as truth.
Here's to you, Ty and Dizzy.
IBWAA member W.H. “Bill” Johnson has contributed to SABR’s Biography Project, written extensively on baseball history, and presented papers at related conferences. Bill and his wife Chris currently reside in Georgia. He can be contacted on Twitter: @BaseballStoic
Extra Innings
For those into Immaculate Grid, Ty Cobb is well known as a Detroit Tiger, but he played two seasons at ages 40 and 41 with the Philadelphia Athletics, hitting .343/.419/.460 over 228 games.