Shortly after this discussion with my then girlfriend, we watched Cobb, Ron Shelton’s 1994 film starring Tommy Lee Jones based on the Al Stump biography. The film depicts Ty Cobb as mean-spirited and racist. Make no mistake, racism of any sort is wrong, but consider that Cobb was born a mere twenty years after the Civil War. He grew up working alongside blacks on his father’s farm in Georgia.
While the Civil War won freedom for blacks, blacks still had, in Cobb’s time, a long way to go before winning any semblance of equality. Cobb’s perception of blacks as inferior, while inarguably wrong, was common in his era.
The truth is Cobb had many run-ins with a lot of people─black and white─whom he perceived as “uppity.”
Major league baseball was, in Cobb’s time, segregated, and Cobb was the first player from the south ever to play in the bigs. A Baptist with a southern accent, he was estranged, viewed as an outsider, hazed mercilessly by his own team mates, who sawed his bats in half, locked him out of hotel bathrooms, cut up his clothes, put horse manure in his shoes, and threw at his feet during batting practice.
In Cobb’s own words: “These old-timers turned me into a snarling wildcat.”
Cobb was also not a good father or husband. His wife divorced him over repeated abuse and his children wanted little to do with him.
He once pistol-whipped to death a man in an alley who, so Cobb claimed, tried to rob him.
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