Ty Cobb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ty_Cobb
At the end of the sixth inning, after being challenged by teammates Sam Crawford and Jim Delahanty to do something about it, Cobb climbed into the stands and attacked Lueker, who it turns out was handicapped (he had lost all of one hand and three fingers on his other hand in an industrial accident). When onlookers shouted at Cobb to stop because the man had no hands, Cobb reportedly replied, “I don’t care if he got no feet!”
Sometimes, my dad likes to talk baseball. And by “sometimes,” I mean “always.”
He’s an interesting one, my dad. I suspect he’s borderline Asperger’s… or maybe even totally raging Asperger’s. He’s obsessed with numbers (like baseball stats or Sudoku puzzles), socially awkward to the point of caricature, and has an anxiety attack when anything alters his plan for the day (even if the plan for the day is “sit in my chair and do 10,000 Sudoku puzzles”).
(I seem to have inherited some of these traits… Obsessions! Social awkwardness! Rampant anxiety! Recently, I took a “Do I Have Asperger’s Syndrome?” test online that was out of 50 points, where 32 and above indicated probable Asperger’s. I scored a 30.)
Regardless, Dad’s obsession with baseball stats is actually a pretty interesting story. When he was very young, he contracted Polio. This was back in the ‘50’s, before the vaccine was invented, and it was a real epidemic—often causing paralysis, sometimes causing death. At that time, the best bet for kids with polio was an Iron Lung, but there were other experimental cures like wrapping legs in warm, wet blankets to stave off the virus’s effects—my dad having undergone the latter.
During his treatment, when he was about 10 or 11, he had to drop out of school and stay in the hospital for months. He was in a unit composed mostly of older World War II veterans who would gripe and yell at him for listening to the radio. To keep him occupied, his parents bought him a Baseball Encyclopedia full of statistics and trivia. He can still can quote it to this day.
Another fun fact: when the Brooklyn Dodgers came to Los Angeles in 1958, he clipped the box score from every game out of the newspaper. I believe they’re still somewhere in the attic of my parents’ house.
Point being: Baseball. He likes it.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it too: I live in L.A., so I’m all about the Dodgers; my cousin Brendan Ryan plays for the Seattle Mariners; I played softball and baseball in high school. But if I mention anything at all to my dad (Hey, what’s up with Don Mattingly? or So, Albert Pujols is being traded to the Angels?), he will spout off for an unlimited amount of time about anything and everything baseball, mostly skewing toward the game’s early days. I once sat in a car with him for 15 minutes while he touched on (among many other things) black players in the 1880’s, Cuban players in the early 1900’s, the Negro Leagues, the 1947 racial integration of the Major Leagues, Satchel Paige (at 42, the oldest player to debut the Major Leagues—and maybe the best pitcher in the history of the game), Jackie Robinson, (Fun fact: he was a UCLA football star and an Army Lieutenant!), Jackie Robinson’s track star brother Mack who earned a Silver Medal in the famous 1936 Berlin Olympics behind Jesse Owens, Pee Wee Reese (Jackie Robinson’s white teammate who publicly supported him), why FDR kept baseball alive during World War II, and even the rise of pro basketball with players like Bill Russell being the first to break the color barrier with the Boston Celtics.
Wow.
Anyway, Ty Cobb came up a few days ago during the most recent baseball conversation, which began with the question, “Albert Pujols is being traded to the Angels?” and somehow ended up about the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Basically, from what I gleaned from my dad, Ty Cobb was a hell of a baseball player, but also a hell of a racist—to the point where he’d allegedly sharpen his metal cleats and intentionally slide into a base defended by a black player so he could take them out. Really fucked up shit. [Ed. Note: Upon review, this may be just an urban legend. Many out there on the internet argue that Cobb was not, in fact, a racist—he was just an asshole.]
Mr. Cobb was a bit (and by “a bit,” I mean “insanely”) surly. And not just to blacks.
During Cobb’s career, he was involved in numerous fights, both on and off the field, and several profanity-laced shouting matches.
Cobb once slapped a black elevator operator for being ‘uppity.’ When a black night watchman intervened, Cobb pulled out a knife and stabbed him. The matter was later settled out of court.
Cobb fought a groundskeeper over the condition of the Tigers’ field in Augusta, Georgia at Spring Training in 1907. Cobb also ended up choking the man’s wife when she intervened.
“Sure, I fought,” said an unrepentant Cobb in a revealing quote. “I had to fight all my life just to survive. They were all against me. Tried every dirty trick to cut me down, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.”
One of my favorite trivia tidbits comes from that time that he beat up a handicapped spectator for implying that he was half-black, the kind of nonsense that got one’s ass briefly suspended from playing in those days. (Nowadays? Probably a lifetime suspension, hefty fines, and significant jail time.) Though they didn’t much like him as a human, his Detroit Tiger teammates protested his suspension and refused to play without him. For one game against the Philadelphia Athletics, they recruited a team of ringers from college and amateur teams to step in. It turned out to be a fairly rare “complete game” for the ringer pitcher—i.e. he pitched the entire game without relief. Sounds like he could have used some, though, since the final score was 24-2, Philadelphia.
He was also one of the first people to invest in Coca-Cola, which meant he became ludicrously wealthy.
Essentially, Ty Cobb was a son of a bitch, but a goddammned good baseball player who made a ton of Major League records—and still holds some of them, including the highest career batting average.
C is for Cobb,
Who grew spikes and not corn,
And made all the basemen
Wish they weren’t born.
You can thank my father for this blog post.
