He was hated from one end of the country to the other, except in Detroit, where he played 22 seasons of fierce, all-consuming competitive baseball. He wasn't a home run hitter. All he did was get base hits: 4,189 of them.* That was a record that stood from 1928, when he retired, to 1985, when Pete Rose broke it.
Ty Cobb was an imperfect human being. In fact, in the common tongue, he was an a**hole. “Cobb is a pr**k,” Babe Ruth once said, reflecting the views of many. “But he sure can hit. God almighty, that man can hit.”
He was also an otherworldly competitor. It's a myth that Ty Cobb sharpened his spikes so that when he slid into second base, he would injure the opposing player. He didn't need sharp spikes to terrify a second baseman. They already knew that he would do anything and everything to win.
It was that burning desire to win that separated Cobb from not only other baseball players of his era, but every other athlete in the early 20th century as well. Perhaps only Jim Thorpe, whom AP named as the best athlete of the first 50 years of the 20th century, and who won the gold medal in both the five-event pentathlon and ten-event decathlon, had that kind of intensity and desire to win.
There's that great scene in Field of Dreams where the late Ray Liotta, playing "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, says of Cobb, “None of us could stand the son of a bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it.” Cobb was, indeed, disliked by most opposing players, but, ironically, Jackson and Cobb were good friends.
The Free Press's Will Rahn, writing about Cobb in the "America 250" series, noted that "The price of greatness can be a sort of insanity: an all-consuming passion, a dedication to success that is borderline pathological," Rahn wrote. "With the desire to be loved, admired, revered, comes the willingness to be hated."
Few have known this so richly as Ty Cobb (1886–1961). A true-blue American nutcase, he was the best baseball player who ever lived and the first true antihero in sports. Through his greatness, he achieved immortality—the final reward of lasting fame. But the media warped him into a caricature: a bigot of supernatural proportions, a purely evil man. Today a cottage industry of Cobb defenders, misguided in its own way, looks to absolve him of everything he did.
How do we reckon with Cobb? In the many descriptions recorded over the years, you notice the word “greatest” is commonplace. Grantland Rice called him “the greatest competitor I’ve ever known.” Ernest Hemingway called him “the greatest of all ballplayers, and an absolute s**t.” Jimmy Cannon was right when he said Cobb was “the strangest of all our national sports idols.” And equally right when he added, “But not even his disagreeable character could destroy the image of his greatness as a player. Ty Cobb was the best. That seemed to be all he wanted.”
Cobb was born 20 years after the Civil War ended in a small Georgia town called Narrows. Baseball was a "Yankee soldier" game, as "occupying" Union troops played it constantly, but Cobb and other Southern boys picked it up anyway.
When he was 18 years old, his mother shot his father to death. The story was that his mother thought his father was an intruder. Legend has it that his dad was trying to catch his mother cheating, and his mother shot him by mistake. However it happened, the event colored Cobb's perspective on life. “They were all against me,” he said in a characteristically Cobbian statement, “but I beat the bastards and left them in a ditch.”
He was a legendary racist. “Cobb could be downright brutal toward African Americans who refused to conform to his preconceptions of how a black person ought to behave,” wrote another biographer, Steven Elliott Tripp. “It did not happen often, but on occasion, he violently assaulted blacks who failed to show him the deference and honor he believed a black man or woman should always show a white man.” I would note that this was a common attitude among Southern whites (and not uncommon among Northern whites) at the turn of the 20th century.
Ty Cobb had a .366 lifetime batting average in the Major Leagues, second only to Negro League legend Josh Gibson's .371. He won 12 batting titles in 24 seasons. He was playing in the so-called "dead ball" era when pitchers were allowed to scuff, spit on, smear tobacco juice, and scratch on a ball that felt more like a 16-inch softball than a Major League regulation ball. That he accomplished what he did playing with a "mush ball" is amazing. He batted .419 in 1911 and .409 in 1912. He hit .401 at the age of 36 in 1922.
Cobb's greatness defined the game of baseball. Sportswriter Joe Posnanski wrote. “He determined exactly how the game was to be played, how the bases were to be run, how a batter was to swing, how a ballplayer was to compete, and all anyone else could do was follow.” No other athlete except Michael Jordan has defined a game so completely. In the 1990s, kids playing on playgrounds and pros playing in Madison Square Garden all wanted to imitate him, his mannerisms, his showmanship. Jordan also had a pathological desire to compete. And win.
Cobb wasn't as evil as his detractors say he was, nor was his whitewashed legacy as clean as his apologists try to portray him. What's certain is that he was the greatest hitter in the history of Major League Baseball.
That's exactly how he wanted to be remembered.
*Cobb was credited with 4,191 hits. But several decades after Rose broke his record on Sept. 11, 1985, baseball statisticians discovered a clerical error that resulted in two hits of Cobb's being counted twice. Rose actually broke the record on Sept. 8, 1985.
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