Glory of Their Times
 

For any of those people in major metro areas - with long drives - The Glory of Their Times Audible book is really incredible. I thought it would just be narration of the book but it's the actual interviews aka the audio from the documentary and it's pretty incredible content. I'm only 5 or 6 interviews in and I will say, to reference the "Hated" list - Cobb is certainly mentioned universally as a primary source to be a such an unpleasant solitary figure by primary sources. There is one interview with a disabled ball player living in basically a hostel/motel that is pretty heartbreaking but on the whole it is filled with wonderful and funny stories including one about a fake/lucky charm pitcher who came out of the stands. Not sure if it's all true but it's wonderful nonetheless.

The disabled player was Hans Lobert. I believe he had been hit by a car shortly before he met Larry Ritter. Hans was living in a motel and hadn't been doing well financially. Larry bought him a TV so he could watch games. I actually own Hans' copy of the book, signed by him and also inscribed by Larry to Hans.

I own a letter from Bucky Walters sent to Ritter referencing Bill McKechnie. I put together a 1935-1942 Cincinnati Reds archive, and that was a good letter to add.

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wonderful audio book. Wore the grooves out on mine.

Do you remember the story about the guy who came out of the stands and was basically a crazy person who thought he could pitch? He has this crazy wind up and he wound up travelling with the team and was their lucky charm "winning" them the pennant for a few years and then he died and they lost the next year? He had a great nickname I can't recall but I can search the audio book for text :)

Charles Victory Faust
 

Found it - it's one of the first stories - Charles Victory Faust

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Faust

Audio
 

You can hear a good deal of it for free here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Pl8JI4pyg

That is awesome! I own Rube Marquard's copy of the book! Signed to him by Larry Ritter.

For the life of me I can't figure out what you are trying to say here...

We all owe Larry Ritter a big 'Thanks' for writing this book and preserving forever the stories that these players told.

I hold both 'Glory' and 'The Boys of Summer' up as the canon of baseball literacy.

Thank you Larry and Roger.

Right up there with Ball 4! :p

I love Roger's book, but his prose tended to be condescending towards those he was writing about. This has bothered me increasingly as the years pass. Golenbock's "Bums" is the perfect, inoffensive companion piece to the sometimes insulting Kahn book.

The Story of Glory
 

As the co-producer/editor of the audio version of "The Glory of Their Times," it's always great to hear how much people enjoy listening to it. If you're interested in learning how it all came about, here's a Net54 link with the "story of Glory."

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthr...of+their+times

George Gibson's hands
 

I mostly played catcher when I played ball, so when I first read The Glory of Their Times, I was fascinated by what the catchers of the day had to say.

I was fortunate enough to pick up a Paul Thompson photo of George Gibson's hands that went perfectly with one memorable passage.

+1

"Fifty-nine in '84" talks a lot about how brutal catching was. That was a decade before most of Ritter's guys got started, but when Radbourn agreed to pitch all of the Gray's games, it meant his "battery mate" had to catch them. Back then, each team had two pitchers and two catchers, but they didn't mix them together. It was grueling for Radbourn, but arguably worse for his catcher. And Radbourn got paid and set free.

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Funny that you should post this. I just bought a copy of this book in a used book store when I was back visiting family in Ohio. Hearing about it, I'm sorry now that I decided to read a book about the history of Great Lakes freighters on the flight home.

"The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee..."

LOL. Too witty!

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I think he's referring to the "50 Most Hated Players of All Time" thread elsewhere on Net 54.

No, I'm speaking literally. Is he saying he should be considered a hated player or should NOT be considered a hated player? The statement I quoted is baffling, especially the multiple uses of "primary source(s)" in the same sentence. He was "mentioned universally," but how? In a bad way? In a good way?? Huh???

Basically a Harvard way of saying "People that ought to know Cobb found him to be a lonely prick"
...That's the jiist I got, anyway.

In The Glory of their Times, read what Joe Wood said about Cobb. He thought Ty was a fair player, not dirty. As to Ty being lonely, is that a reason to hate him or have empathy for him? He grew up in the south not long after they lost the Civil War, went to play for a team in the far north, had his mother kill his father under mysterious circumstances..... of course he felt like an outsider.

During his playing days, Cobb was competing (fighting) against those players. But after he retired, he often sent money, quietly, to guys who were struggling financially. To try to judge Cobb you first have to make a serious effort to understand him, which isn't easy.

The overwhelming consensus on Ritter's tapes, even from teammates who paint him in an unattractive light in many other respects, is that on the ballfield he was tough but fair, that he was decidedly NOT a dirty player. I'm no Cobb scholar, but from the research for my book and from listening to every second of the "Glory" tapes, my opinion is that Ty Cobb was quite a complicated individual, like most of us a mixture of good and bad impulses, and also a man very much of his time and his upbringing, again like most of us and a mix of good and bad. If you were on the receiving end of his racism, temper, or obsessive drive to win, you didn't have much use for him. If you were on the good side of his friendship and respect or was one who benefited from his sympathy for the underdog or enormous charity toward the underprivileged throughout his lifetime, you liked or even loved him. My grandfather--diametrically opposite in personality--saw all sides of Cobb for decades, and they were good friends. Joe Wood and Clyde Milan, wonderful men by all accounts, were hunting buddies of Cobb's. My mother remembered him fondly and called him "the perfect southern gentleman." What you thought of Ty Cobb depends on who you were and what you had to do with him, in other words the truth about him is not a simple good or bad or black or white. I do think more people were probably glad that he lived and made the tremendous impact on the game and other people's lives he did than those who would prefer to have never heard his name.

My opinion of Cobb is, essentially, one of like humanity.
I never met, associated with or had to resolve any conflicts with him. Therefore, I'm not entitled to any opinion. My opinion of like humanity is also limited where Cobb is concerned because I know very few that have been millionaires and brilliant--as Cobb, undeniably, was.
I do think his longevity and sound relationships with the majority of his teammates, opponents and business associates paint him favorably.
In addition, as we learn everyday, people are jealous & petty and seldom look at another person's point of view.
This empirical fact, alone, would mount "common knowledge" of Cobb being an asshole to anyone he didn't comply with.

For me, he's a graceful, beautiful player that I likely would've gotten along with great.

That would have mostly depended on what he thought of you, I believe.

Hank, is there much in the way of documented accounts of Cobb being racist?

Great question, and one I would like to know the answer to myself. I would assume that whatever documentation has been found on the subject one way or the other would be recited in one or more of the several biographies, but I have only read the Alexander book and that was many years ago. My impression to that effect is based mostly on Sam Crawford's interviews with Ritter, which in other respects I found to be honest, accurate, and persuasive. I can't remember if Davy Jones addressed that aspect of Cobb's personality, which he also didn't have much good to say about in general. Those two interviews when it comes to Cobb can perhaps be discounted somewhat by the assumption of some jealousy on their part, but you'd be hard pressed to find two men who saw more of him in a baseball context and off the field as well, so their accounts have to be taken with a great deal of weight and seriousness. The other point I would make is that it would be most surprising, in a country that had so recently fought a civil war over the issue of the legal enslavement of blacks and was still virulently racist in every meaningful respect, to find someone from the deep south who was NOT a racist at that time. But if you can show me that Cobb was the exception that proves the rule, I would be eager to stand corrected.

I don't follow. What someone thinks of me is irrelevant.
I can get along with them if I choose to.

If you say so, and good for you.

Cobb's grandfather, with whom he was very close, prided himself claiming he was the only person in his town who voted for Lincoln. Cobb's father was a Democrat but in his short time in government work showed many times to be a friend of the black man and was often at odds with those who were openly virulently bigoted. So Cobb came from a lineage of men who bucked the trends on the issue of race during their lifetimes.

To me Cobb had an equal opportunity temper. White men and black men were on the wrong side of it.

And the story of him beating on a black groundskeepers wife and also the groundskeeper himself may have been fictional as it may have been made up by a teammate who was working with new manager Hughie Jennings to find a way to get Cobb off the team as Jennings feared he was "bad for team harmony". There were no other witnesses to the event. The two who he allegedly beat up were never approached by the media of the time. Cobb immediately denied it ever happened.

Didn't Cobb have great things to say about some black players, like Willie Mays? A racist probably wouldn't do that.

Tris Speaker also came from the deep south (Texas) and was probably a racist in his younger days, as was typical of southerners born that soon after the war. But in his later years he was noted for mentoring Larry Doby.

If Cobb and Speaker, coming from the south to play in far northern cities, brought some of their regional prejudices with them, they gradually grew with the nation to become much more accepting of blacks. I would say, from what I've read, that they were no more racist, and probably less so, than most of the people in their respective home towns.

Writing
 

JollyElm - I was just trying of highlight that his contemporaries describe him difficult and solitary. I should have said that but alas, writing is not my strong suit. Valid beef! :)

All good points. When I called Cobb a racist--and as I said, I'm willing to stand corrected on that--I was referring to the younger man, and drew on the comments of his teammates on GOTT. Of course, the country changed dramatically in its racial attitudes over his lifetime, and it would surprising if many of the old-time players didn't change also. For example, I don't know how you could call the U.S. Armed Forces, which remained segregated until 1948, or many of the nation's schools that stayed that way into the 1960s, anything but racist based on those policies. But eventually they changed, the country changed, and people changed. I will ask again what concrete documentation was discovered in the research for his many biographies, and what does it point to in the racial attitudes of the younger Ty Cobb? I did a page or two in my biography of my grandfather on the racial issue and what little I could find where it impacted his careeer, mostly based on a handful of exhibition games he pitched against black teams and his fulsome praise of Josh Gibson after seeing him play in a spring training game in Florida in 1939. What is there on Cobb from original sources, I'd like to know?

Here are a few accounts:


But a lot of people have made assumptions about Cobb based on the date of his birth and the location, which was 1886 in Royston, Georgia or near Royston, Georgia, and so people just assume that he must have been a racist. But what they don't know — and what I found out — is that he descends from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a preacher who preached against slavery and was run out of town. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. His father was a state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and broke up a lynch mob in town and had a very short political career because of it.

[Cobb] never said anything about race until 1952 when he told the Sporting News that "the Negro has the right to play professional sports," he said, "and who's to say he has not."


https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2015/...arles-leerhsen


I have over 40,000 newspaper articles, and NOT one article makes any correlation to Ty Cobb being a racist. All the evidence demonstrates Cobb’s support for the advancement of colored people, and yet, there is NO evidence that gives any indication that Mr. Cobb made any movement toward oppressing the black population.

Contrary, when Jackie Robinson entered into the major leagues, it began a slow process of allowing blacks to begin entering into every league in the country. When the Dallas club of the Texas League was considering allowing blacks to enter, Cobb was there to bat for them.


https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...s-not-a-racist



When he began work on a new biography, “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” (Simon & Schuster), Charles Leerhsen expected to uncover fresh depictions of the player as a racist and a spikes-sharpening attacker of opposing infielders. If Cobb was the meanest man in baseball flannels, additional animosity would not be difficult to find.

“I thought I’d find new examples of monstrous monstrosity,” Leerhsen said in an interview last week. “Instead, I found a very different person than the myth. I was a little disappointed at first. He’s more normal than I thought.”

Leerhsen’s research found neither a saint nor a Rabelaisian character like Babe Ruth. Sure, Cobb could be unpleasant and overly sensitive. He had a temper and fought with his share of people, including a fan who heckled him mercilessly. But Leerhsen did not unearth a bigot primed to attack black men or a brandisher of carefully filed daggers beneath his shoes.

“It’s a warts-and-all biography,” Leerhsen said, laughing. “But they’re warts, not tumors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/s...notoriety.html

That's an impressive ancestry of anti-racists, for sure, but is Ty known to have followed their lead in any fashion? 1952 seems a little late to be standing up for the right of blacks to play in the majors, if that's his first comment about it for the record. Is there any indication of Cobb having played in exhibitions against black teams, as so many white players did in those days? And the lack of documentation of his racial attitudes among Leerhsen's 40,000 articles doesn't surprise me, I would guess that to be true of most major leaguers of the era, it just wasn't something they would be asked about or would want to discuss during that time. I realize I'm playing a bit of the Devil's Advocate here, but it seems like pretty thin gruel to chew on so far, especially when balanced against Crawford's searing anecdotes on the GOTT tapes. Sam and Ty weren't close, to be sure, but I'm dubious that Crawford would make this stuff up to Ritter at that point in his life to get back at Cobb, and then there is Jones's corroboration and expansion on much of what Crawford had to say.

My take on Sam Crawford from the GOTT is that he was more of a "Ty Cobb" than Cobb himself. Loner, curmudgeonly, jealous, etc.

As Crawford said, "Cobb “came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little razzing into a life-or-death struggle,” Crawford recounted for Lawrence Ritter in The Glory of their Times years later. “He came up from the South, you know, and he was still fighting the Civil War. As far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees before he even met us.”

Little razzing indeed. Do you recall what they did to Cobb?

"The pretty thin gruel to chew on" would be calling someone a racist without evidence.

Regardless, no one should be called "racist" without strong evidence showing such.

It is one of my favorite audio books...note the audio version has different content than the printed books. I believe some of the interviews were shortened for clarity.

When Jimmy Austin talks, you really get a feel for how much love he had for the game. My favorite discussions were probably with Rube Marquard and Fred Snodgrass were probably my favorites.

Z

Do you recall what Davy Jones answered when Ritter asked him why they pulled tricks on him? Cobb was getting into fights his whole life. And I'll take the evidence I heard on the tapes over the "thin gruel" that has been presented so far on the other side. I have no problem calling the entire country racist during that period, in fact there's still a lot of that going around. You can believe whatever you want, but let's not sugarcoat our history or start putting revisionist spins on it, it is what it is.

Back to the tapes, thank God. The five hours on the CDs are HEAVILY edited from the hundred or so hours of original tapes. That took a lot of work, as you can read about in the link I provided for the story of the making of the audio set. As for favorites, every time Neal and I had finished the edit of a new player for the set, we said to each, "That's my new favorite!" They're all great, in my not-so-humble opinion. Ironically, the one interview on the set Larry didn't like was Jimmy Austin, in fact he wanted us to take Jimmy off the finished product, a request we ignored after agonizing consideration. We loved his interview, and eventually Ritter came around to, also.

I'll leave it as is...calling a man racist with no evidence is wrong.
Perhaps if Cobb was your Grandfather you'd reconsider

I purchased your Walter Johnson book from you a few years ago, enjoyed it

From Davy Jones' NY Times obituary


In an interview in 1970, Mr. Jones told how he spearheaded a strike in 1912 involving the centerfielder, met with club owners to patch things up and then helped to organize players’ fraternity, the forerunner to the present Major League Baseball Players Association.

“We were in New York and a fellow was insulting Cobb,” Mr. Jones said. “I told Cobb that if he didn't punch him in the nose then I would. Cobb went up there and gave the man a beating,” he said. Cobb was suspended and fined $500. Mr. Jones said that when Cobb had not been reinstated when the team moved to Philadelphia, he talked the Detroit players into walking out. They refused to play until Cobb was reinstated.

He was reinstated and league officials approved a rule allowing players the right to ask that tormentors bi ejected from ball parks.

I'm glad you liked my book, Byrone, thanks for that. But you keep saying "no evidence" as if the Crawford and Jones tapes don't exist. I keep asking for some firm evidence that Cobb was somehow the opposite of what they claimed. There was considerable evidence to that effect about my grandfather, and I wrote about and documented it. Where's the evidence for Cobb? The games he played against black teams; contemporary admiration for the black players of his time; etc.? As for his fighting, he got into lots of fights for different reasons, not just when he was taunted from the stands. The good things I have to say about Cobb in my book far outweigh the bad things, something also reflected by the players in "Glory" the book and audio. I just don't see any reason to try to pretend that the bad wasn't there, too. Perhaps the picture of Cobb painted in the past did accentuate the bad to an unfair degree, and the one-sided impression created by Stump and others needed to be corrected, but there's no sense in going too far now in the other direction and trying to pretend he was some kind of saint. Feel free to respond to this, Byrone, then let's close it out, I'm all Cobbed out!

The problem I have with this line of thinking is that it merely perpetuates the unfounded talking point that he was "constantly fighting the civil war". This connotes that his pugilistic attitudes were simply a product of his Southern upbringing. Just because Sam Crawford said it and many newspapers of the time said it does not make it so. That is way too simplistic and lazy for this exceedingly complicated man. "He is a Southerner and he is combative therefore he"... X y and z. Sorry not buying it. The revisionist history you describe is what has been written about Cobb since he arrived in Detroit. He was very hard to understand and frequently played into what was written about him during his playing career so as to use it to his advantage on the field of play. The press was all too eager and lazy to oblige.

And again, the mention of Cobb and "racist" together simply continues another lazy talking point that is unproven and actually contradicts much of the known facts about his life. What we know as fact shows that his lineage is that of Southerners who were sympathetic to the cause of blacks, that his quotes show a man supportive of the integration of baseball, and his actions show a great financial support of those less fortunate of all races. As you say, it is easy to show most all people from that era as being racist, especially using today's definition of the term. But he was certainty no moreso than the general public at large, and the facts show that he was likely less so.

The revisionist history is what Al Stump and other authors have done to his legacy. It's a lazy way of looking at a complicated man. Certainty no saint as you say. Hard to know and hard to like by many. But he obviously was also misunderstood even by many of those closest to him such as Sam Crawford who said in the Ritter tapes that he hadn't a friend in baseball. That is incorrect to the extreme and is contradicted by others on the tapes as well. So as to these firsthand accounts of Crawford and Jones which seem to be perhaps a bit clouded by personal feelings of animosity, possible jealousy, and the decades since the events had happened by the time they were interviewed by Ritter...always with a grain of salt.

Taken all together - Cobb was mean, but not evil....as such, it made him great....

Never said Cob was a saint. Don't think anyone ever has.

You seem to put a lot of weight on the possibility that he may have not played against black teams.
It was clear that once Cobb's Detroit season was over, that was it...off he went to Georgia without much thought of baseball. It's probably true that he didn't play much against white teams off-season either.
He hunted and rested mostly.
He detested spring training, often showing up only when he absolutely had to. While many players would need spring training to get in shape, Cobb was already in great shape, from all his hunting and hiking over the winter.

And as mentioned, if Crawford or others said that Cobb had no friends in baseball,they lied. He had plenty. And again, it wasn't that Cobb wanted to hang around ball players all year, he obviously enjoyed having time to himself.

I just don't see any reason to try to pretend that the bad wasn't there, too. Perhaps the picture of Cobb painted in the past did accentuate the bad to an unfair degree, and the one-sided impression created by Stump and others needed to be corrected, but there's no sense in going too far now in the other direction and trying to pretend he was some kind of saint


I guess that's what we are seeking, the truth. Was he sometimes bad? He sure was. But racist? I'm not so sure.

And I hate it when people flippantly throw around the word "racist"

I'm just looking for solid evidence one way or the other, of which very little has been presented in this thread. I have the voices on the tapes, which I believe present all sides of Cobb, many to the positive but also including Crawford's searing comments on his racial attitude. You think Sam made all that up? I doubt it, although you are right that he did exaggerate the extent of Cobb's lack of friends. As I pointed out in my original post, he had many friends, including my grandfather. Upon further evaluation, and as a result of your strenuous objections, I will no longer label Ty Cobb a racist until I see more evidence to that effect. I don't do anything "flippantly," but I did perhaps succumb to a common wisdom of long standing that deserves re-evaluation. On the other hand, I'm very surprised that the scholarship on Cobb in recent times doesn't seem to have established a firm answer to that question. All the letters he wrote? All the interviews he gave over his lifetime? All the articles, all the books? And we are still debating the question? I find that mystifying.

Since you are trying to prove a negative - that Cobb was not a racist, then you are making that point with your words, bolded above. If Cobb is accused of being a racist, yet after all the letters, interviews, etc. it is still not established, then odds are strong it is not there.

Put another way, had Cobb been a racist, it would have been clearly established by now, probably by his own words, spoken or written somewhere.

Your point about requiring evidence is well made, but not this part of it, in my opinion. It's not something that was ever addressed in either direction by the vast majority of ballplayers, I would guess, an extremely controversial topic and not something they would want to appear in print about. Have you heard Crawford on the "Glory" tapes? I don't see how his stories can be discounted entirely, but as I noted, I'm suspending all judgement on the matter and keeping an open mind. I will even go so far as to admit that I was wrong to call him that with just that one interview with a teammate to go on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzbJn2UAoIs

Compelling case for Cobb being a non-racist.