Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Like many students of baseball history, I had always admired Cobb the player but believed Cobb the person much less admirable. I assumed he was simply a man of his time and place who could not overcome being born in the Deep South during segregation nor perhaps a natural inclination towards misanthropy. Charles Leerhsen’s Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty has convinced that nearly everything I “knew” about Cobb was wrong. Largely thanks to scholarship that emerged only at the very end of Cobb’s life (and interestingly, at odds with evidence from much earlier periods) his reputation is that of a miserable, friendless, racist lout. When his name is invoked today, it’s usually to denounce the hypocrisy of the Hall of Fame’s so-called “character clause” (“if the Hall really cared about character, they’d kick Cobb out”). Yet as Leerhsen notes this flies in the face of the simple fact that Cobb was not only in the very first Hall of Fame class, but received more votes than any other player including Babe Ruth, belying the notion that he was disliked by his contemporaries. African-Americans who personally knew him were quoted as saying they not only liked him, but loved him. So, where did the myth begin and why does it continue? An important part of A Terrible Beauty is helping us to understand how baseball has gotten a vital part of its own story so wrong. Time and time again, Leerhsen peels back numerous myths and subjects them to painstaking scrutiny. He accepts nothing at face value. His judicious use of evidence leaves us a much better understanding of this complicated man who was the best player of baseball in its purest form. The Cobb that emerges in Leerhsen’s combination of biography, history and literature (for it is brilliantly written as well) is a fascinating contradiction. He was a man who exploited any perceived weakness on the ball field without a second thought. A fielder in what he (and other players of the era) considered his “right of way” on the base paths did so at the risk of significant injury. But the same Cobb would also plead for leniency for a man who had stolen his car and took great pains to answer his fan mail religiously with advice, signing autographs and mailing photos, even courteously thanking the writer for the honor of the request. Leerhsen’s readers are also treated to a superb description of the era in which Cobb played (a vital aspect of his story given how different the game was prior to 1920 when runs were scarce and home runs almost non-existent). Cobb’s determination first to get on base (lifetime OBP of .433) and move along the base paths until he scored (second only to Ricky Henderson in lifetime runs) was unparalleled. He was a serious student of the game who lacked the natural gifts of a Joe Jackson, but compensated by intellect and intensity. His greatest satisfaction was solving the puzzles of the diamond, and outsmarting opponents. Cobb was no saint. He got into his share of fights when his Southern sensibilities were aroused, but given what a rough and brutal age it was in general, and the behavior typical of the very blue collar class from which ball players generally emerged, he was not atypical of his generation in this regard. Leehsen’s mastery of the times in which Cobb lived is extraordinarily illuminating as no part of the Cobb myth is spared his careful appraisal. Given how manifestly incorrect our current perception of Ty Cobb is, then, this may be the most important baseball history book to have been published in years.