Revisit: Cobb - by Al Stump

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Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.

An "absolute shit" was how Ernest Hemingway described him. "He had a screw loose...it was like his brain was miswired so that the least damned thing would set him off," the American writer remarked. To Harold Seymour, he was "temperamental, humorless, egocentric." "With Detroit he had no friends...they hated his guts," the historian once wrote. Philadelphia A's manager Connie Mack colorfully summarized him as a "back-alley artist" and a "no-good ruffian." Perhaps player Fred Haney said it best: "He had spells, fits. Unimportant things made him blow. Some of the boys thought it was a case of brain fever."

Such is the image of Ty Cobb that dominates Al Stump's stellar 1994 biography, now rightly regarded as one of the finest sports biographies ever penned. Expertly written and meticulously researched, Cobb is as close to legitimate historical writing as a sports-based biography can get. Stump, who previously acted as ghostwriter for Cobb's one-sided and deceptively titled autobiography My Life in Baseball: The True Record, produced the definitive and most objective examination of the ballplayer yet with this study. Written fluidly and with a flair for the both the mundane and dramatic aspect's of Cobb's life, it belongs on any serious list of the last century's best biographies.

The Ty Cobb that emerges from the pages of this biography was most often a bastard. Not in the literal sense - the ballplayer was the son of a teacher father and underage teenage bride mother - but in ways that such a term cannot possibly fully capture. Cobb was deeply flawed, both on and off the diamond; it's no wonder only three players attended his funeral in 1961. Despite his obvious admiration for Cobb as an athlete, Stump is brutally direct when examining Cobb as a person. The depiction is not pretty: short-tempered, excessively racist even by the standards of his time, negligent as a father and husband, frequently brawling with fans, teammates, opponents and even umpires upon the slightest perceived insult, Cobb comes across as a loose cannon and live wire rolled into one.

His sins were many and were almost so frequent as to border on the type of fisticuffs-infused excess usually reserved for a violent Hollywood blockbuster. Often his victims were black; in 1906 he choked a black woman, while in 1909 he somehow managed to escape serious jail time after an altercation with a hotel employee resulted in the employee being stabbed numerous times by Cobb. Whites weren't exempt from such outbursts either; in one infamous incident, Cobb climbed into the stands to rough up a crippled fan who had been jeering him during a game. The man, who only had two fingers on one hand and none on the other, was defenseless as Cobb pounded him. The crowd's cries for mercy were met with none. "I don't care if he has no legs" Cobb reportedly snarled during the attack.

But goddamn he was a fantastic player, as Stump demonstrates throughout this biography. Still today Cobb's stats - his career batting average, number of hits, stolen bases, batting titles, to mention but a few - defy believability, even though the outfielder played most of his career in the so-called deadball era. Stump convincingly shows that Cobb was essentially a scientific ballplayer, with an emphasis placed on precision hitting, sometimes-reckless base stealing and mental warfare waged against opponents and, in some cases, teammates, officials and club owners. Cobb mastered the art of antagonism on the diamond; trash talking was part of his repertoire long before it had a formal name, while his spikes-out slides frequently left opponents' legs bloodied or worse. To Stump's credit, he never gets bogged down in regurgitating Cobb's gaudy career numbers, instead carefully weaving specific plays and events into the broader narrative of the player's life.

Though Stump offers an unflinchingly honest summary of Cobb's often reprehensible actions, the author still manages to evoke some degree of sympathy for the baseball legend. The burden of coping with his father's death - shot to death by Cobb's mother under mysterious circumstances in 1905 - apparently weighed heavily on Cobb throughout his life. The degree to which that event influenced the player's actions in both his personal and professional life is of course open to conjecture, but Stump suggests the impact on Cobb's psyche was severe. Cobb in some ways was a forerunner to the modern athlete: he invested and endorsed wisely, becoming a millionaire in the process, challenged baseball's restrictive labor policies decades before free agency would become a reality, glad-handed with politicians and presidents and even established a college fund for underprivileged Georgia students. Essentially, Ty Cobb became a brand unto himself, with all the positive and negative connotations that brand evinced.

In his final years Cobb cut a pathetic figure; still prone to spasms of violence and unpredictability, his last days were spent battling the effects of cancer, diabetes and overconsumption of booze as his health - but apparently not his acerbic tongue - declined. He died with none of the fanfare and goodwill afforded his rival Babe Ruth - whose brawny, long-ball style of play Cobb loathed - and will likely be remembered as much for his sandpaper personality as his various baseball achievements. No one will ever truly know what made Cobb tick; maybe he was mentally tweaked as those who encountered him - or who otherwise felt his physical or mental wrath - him stated.

Though Cobb remains inscrutable in many ways over a century after his first professional game, Al Stump's biography offers the most complete understanding of the man that we are likely to ever have. As sports fans we sometimes tend to romanticize our sports giants and ignore any unsavory aspects that cloud such a mythical ideal. Al Stump's biography glosses over nothing; impartial as any such book should be yet written with an appreciation for Cobb's on-field accomplishments, Cobb is a brilliant, and often troubling, account of a man whose fame - and infamy - are still etched in both baseball's and America's history.

The Bronx is Burning - 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler

Never judge a book by its movie, especially if that book has been brought to the small screen by ESPN. Jonathan Mahler’s The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City offers a sweeping and ambitious study of 1977 shithole-era New York that the ESPN miniseries could only hint at. Whereas the miniseries’ primary focus was on the dysfunctional Yankees and the season-long pissing contest between outfielder Reggie Jackson and manager Billy Martin, Mahler instead focuses on the broader social and cultural climate of the city, including the mayoral campaign runoff between Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch, the blackout and the looting that followed, the city’s financial crisis, and the Son of Sam killings. It is far more than just another book about baseball (or worse, another baseball book about the Yankees).

Mahler vividly paints a descriptive portrait of 1977 New York without getting bogged down in extraneous details - the writing style is always straightforward and direct, and oftentimes humorous. Sufficient (and interesting) biographical background is provided for key figures like Jackson, Martin, Cuomo, and Koch, which allows the reader to gain an understanding of these figures and how their backgrounds influenced their actions. Mahler also shows how these backgrounds played out against the backdrop of the struggling city, most notably in the mayoral election runoff, where both Cuomo and Koch could both cynically be accused of running campaigns that were precursors to the negative campaigns frequently seen today.

Mahler raises several interesting social questions throughout the book, which for the most part failed to come across in the ESPN miniseries. The most thought-provoking, and sensitive, is the issue of racial tension and specifically how it played out during the blackout and the massive looting that resulted, since the looting by and large occurred in poor, predominantly African-American areas of the city. The question Mahler raises is whether the looters were exercising some sort of sophisticated form of violent social protest, or whether the looting was mostly led by a criminal element that saw an opportunity for free merchandise and took advantage of it. Ultimately it is difficult to argue with Mahler’s conclusion that the looting was probably motivated more by opportunity than by an enlightened form of political or economic revolt.

The obvious implication throughout the book is that the Yankees represented a baseball version of the social and racial issues that troubled the city in 1977. In some ways, this is hard to dispute. Billy Martin was accused in the past of making racist comments, even demoting or benching players because of their skin color, and his handling of truculent superstar Reggie Jackson could be seen as racially motivated. At the same time, Martin was pretty much an ornery bastard who conflicted with lots of people, such as whiter-than-white Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Mahler also shows that some of the Yankee players, such as catcher Thurman Munson, disliked Jackson, though in Munson’s case this appears to have been motivated not by race, but by Jackson’s higher salary and perceived threat to Munson’s role as team captain.

In other ways, however, it is difficult to view such tensions as realistic barometers for the New York social climate in 1977; instead, they most likely were little more than the usual clubhouse politics, cliques, and conflicts of personality that occur within any team. Perhaps the hindsight we now have to look back at the 1977 team, and all the baggage New York in 1977 brought with it, has given a greater significance to that team’s internal tension than should actually be given. Mahler’s study of the team and his attempts to draw parallels between the Yankees’ culture and those of New Yorkers in general is interesting, though for me at least it is still difficult to view that team in such a broader context.

This is one of the few squabbles I have about The Bronx is Burning. The only other complaint I have with the book — and it’s only because I’m a sick musicholic well past the point of recovery — is Mahler’s reductive explanation of the 1977 music scene. It’s pure Intro to Music History 101, with the New York punk scene covered in only a few short paragraphs and with only the most obvious bands briefly mentioned. But this too is a minor complaint.

Anyone familiar with baseball history knows how the 1977 season ended, with the often-maligned (which was sometimes self-created) Reggie Jackson hitting three first-pitch home runs in game 6 of the World Series to lead the Yankees to victory. It was a rare bright spot in an otherwise bleak year for New York (and even then, Jackson had to run like hell to get to the locker room as celebrating fans stormed the field). Far more than the miniseries could hope to accomplish, Mahler’s works is a great study of 1977 New York and the athletes, politicians, looters, and everyday New Yorkers (and one serial killer) who lived through it.