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Posted By: prewarsports

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.

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.

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.

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.