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Posted By: <b>prewarsports</b><p>Ty Cobb gets a bad rap on many, many areas of his life. I am not advocating he was a great guy, as he obviously was not, but people forget several things. First of all 100% of all white men born in the 19th century were racist, especially in Georgia. It is just a fact of out history and to argue anything otherwise only represents an ignorance to history of our countries social fabric. Tris Speaker was a KKK member but how often do we refer to him as a horrible racist? They were being taught by their parents, teachers, religious leaders etc to be racist and then now people 100 years later condemn them for believing what ever authority figure in their lives have told them was true. I am not saying everyone hated minorities, but even early civil rights activists were racist in their practices (people like Abraham Lincoln etc were racist but realized slavery was wrong at its base). Hindsight is 20/20 and we now know that racism is horrible, but in the late 19th century it was a normal part of life and to condemn someone for being racist in 1900 would essentially be condemning the entire world for a commonly held practice. It was normal, legal and completely acceptable to be racist in Ty Cobbs playing days. We now know how wrong that was, but they did not have the benefit of the teachers and education tools we possess today to break those stereotypes. <br /><br />Ty Cobb was also subject to the experience of his adultering mother kill his beloved father. How many of us would be able to overcome that unscathed? Maybe we should also blame Cobb in the days before mediaction and therapy for taking his playing to an extreme every day to try and prove something to his dead father. <br /><br />It is also speculated that much of the Al Stump book is fabrication and should not be looked at as pure fact. I am sure some of it is true, but some of it is absolutely fiction.<br /><br />Ty Cobb was a bad dude with plenty of faults, no doubt. But to treat him as one of the worst men of all time because he was a product of his time and horrible social situations is a bit far fetched. I am not sticking up for him, but to villify a man born in the 1880's using 2007 standards of conduct is laughable.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

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Posted By: <b>Al C.risafulli</b><p>I understand that many people around the turn of the century were racist.<br /><br />There is, however, regardless of the time, no justification for physical assaults on people - particularly for the reasons Cobb did it. Jumping into the stands and beating a fan, stabbing someone, et cetera - those are crimes today, just as they were crimes in the early 1900s. <br /><br />The implication that a person was justified in beating people because times were different back then doesn't hold water with me.<br /><br />Yes, overt racism was more prevalent then - and in many circles, it was acceptable behavior. But I don't know that there's any justification for the physical element of it.<br /><br />Thankfully, we get to judge Ty Cobb on his phenomenal baseball playing ability instead of his personality issues.<br /><br />Hopefully, history will let us do the same for Barry Bonds.<br /><br />-Al

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Posted By: <b>Jeff Lichtman</b><p>Mark, I never said that Cobb was a victim. I simply attempted to explain some reasoning for his psychotic actions. Sorry if that was a bit too much for you to understand; I'll break it down a bit for you next time.<br />And I never said Cobb was not responsible for his actions: I simply tried to find some causes in his life that may have triggered his psychotic behavior -- triggers that appear to be absent in Bonds's life. That I think less of a guy who has been given everything since he was born -- and still acts like a petulant jerk, should not be so surprising. And finally, when did I say that the media scrutiny was worse back in Cobb's day? I'm starting to wonder if anyone actually reads what I write out here. I simply pointed out that Cobb's young adult troubles were well documented by the press and in Bonds's case, the overbearing press has yet to find a single thing in his childhood that would suggest a reason as to why he has become a lying, cheating, girlfriend-beating, steroid-taking boor; therefore, since it has never come out, I believe it is fair to presume that nothing earth-shattering happened to Bonds as a youth which caused such behavior.<br />

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Posted By: <b>Gilbert Maines</b><p>Jeff,<br />No intents offended.<br />But your statements are way O/T in an O/T thread.<br />By and large, the expertise which most of us bring to bear here includes baseball and baseball cards. If you want to discuss what makes a looney tick, may I suggest one of those psychodoodle boards.<br /><br />Regarding the basic O/T thread: I was a NY Giants fan in the 1950s. As such, I came to think that Mays was a top man in baseball. But not the top. There was the guy in St. Louis who would hit a scortching line drive every at bat. Many falling for extra bases. And he hit for average, about one out of three. As good as the Man was, Williams was a cut above. Or two.<br /><br />Mays was a showman, a tremendous ballplayer for sure, but a bit theatrical. He would, for example, choose a baseball cap which was too big for him, so that he could run out from under it, simulating tremendous speed (which was not all phoney, by any means), just not quite as good as he would put on. He had lots of tricks, he was coached by the experts; who too were very good, but not quite as good as they would put on either. And they fine tuned the routines for decades before MLB woke up.<br /><br />But there was nobody close to Williams who I ever saw play. He hit for avarage too. Over .340<br />He hit for power too. He is one of the few in the elite &gt;600 sluggers club consisting of Greenberg, Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Williams and now Bonds. If Bonds can keep it up. Actually, I hope Bonds can bring up his average back to .300, because he is the only member of this group to be under that mark. But Bonds' career is not yet over. He could still drop under a 600 slugger in his quest to set a HR mark that ARod and others may have difficulty achieving.

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Posted By: <b>John Kalafarski</b><p> I'm glad someone else besides myself saw Ted Williams play. I'm getting to think that he'll be the last .400 hitter the game will see. And with power. When the center field camera shot came to TV in about 1954-55, one could really see the poetry of his swing. I remember how mad I was when Ted hit below .300, the only year in 19 that it happened. That was in 1959 when he had a pinched nerve in his neck and couldn't turn his head much at all. In 1957 he hit .388 and with a little speed he would have hit .400 again, but by then Father Time had slowed him down. In the fifties we kid Red Sox fans would check the league's top ten batters and ignore the team standings.

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Posted By: <b>jay behrens</b><p>Jeff any not try and find some explanations for Bonds behaviour too? Finding out about a person's childhood, even in these days, is not easy unless you are already in the spotlight. There was no reason to look closely at Bonds until he hit college. We really have no idea what Bonds' childhood was like, outside of assumptions like yours that he must have had it good becuase he came from a rich family with a baseball heritage.<br /><br />I have read your posts and you tried make the fact Cobb's childhood being know by the public was the equivalent of modern media scrutiny. It doesn't take a poking and prying media to find out something like. Try applying the same standards you use for Cobb and use them for Bonds too.<br /><br />Jay<br><br>I love pinatas. You get to beat the crap of something and get rewarded with candy.

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Posted By: <b>Jeff Lichtman</b><p>Jay, I just emailed Bonds and asked him why he's such a jerk and why his head has grown so much in the past 15 years. I told him that Network 54 readers want to know. He just replied and told me to F myself.

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Posted By: <b>John H.</b><p>Peter Chao said, "Mays had the edge in two facets of the game over Cobb. He was a better fielder and had more power."<br /><br />We will never know the true extent of Cobb's power. He didn't go to the plate to hit the ball over the fence. He played small ball, as did everyone else in his era. He once disparaged Ruth's homeruns for being cheap hits. Who knows? Had he wanted to, Cobb may have been able to lead the league in homeruns on a regular basis before the Babe moved to the outfield on a fulltime basis.<br /><br />John <br /><br />

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Posted By: <b>Jeff Lichtman</b><p>John, the story goes that tired of being questioned about Ruth's ability to hit homeruns, Cobb responded by stating that hitting them was not a big deal - and proceeded to hit 5 over the next two games before going back to hitting singles and triples.

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Posted By: <b>jay behrens</b><p>For his era, Cobb had amazing power. Just look at the number of doubles and triples he hit. I don't have a breakdown of SLG for deadballers, but I'd be willing to bet that Cobb is tops, or at least top 5 for the deadball era.<br /><br />Jay<br><br>I love pinatas. You get to beat the crap of something and get rewarded with candy.

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Posted By: <b>Jeff Lichtman</b><p>Yeah, for some reason Cobb is viewed today as a 'small' ballplayer (perhaps because of the 'small ball' style he played). The truth is he was above-average sized as a player and was in the top 10 in HRs in the American league for 12 years of his career, leading the league one year.<br /><br />Edited to add: as for slugging percentage, Cobb led the league for six straight years and eight total in his career.