Cobb: A Biography – Al Stump, 1994 ★★½

Printing the Legend

In a sport that attracts difficult personalities, Tyrus Raymond Cobb stands alone. He abused teammates, punched out umpires, spiked opponents, waded through a crowd to thrash a disabled fan, and showcased a hatred for black people so vicious it upset his fellow whites even in a more racist time.

Ty Cobb didn’t even pretend to care: “I get into a lot of trouble and have made many enemies. But my philosophy is brief. I think life is too short to be diplomatic. A man’s friends shouldn’t mind what he does or says – and those who are not his friends, well, the hell with them. They don’t count.”

At least that’s been the popular legend. It circulated long before Cobb’s one-time biographical collaborator, Al Stump, took up his pen to give us in 1994 what he subtitled “The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball,” which not only confirmed the legend but amplified it. Since then, people have wondered about Stump and his book. Is it a legit account, or a hatchet job by a hack who unfairly maligned a complicated man?

Of late, there has been a reconsideration of Cobb’s legacy. An important new biography of Cobb, by Charles Leerhsen, pushes back against the Stump version. Leerhsen cites sources and calls out Stump’s work as bilious slander. For years, others, including Cobb’s descendants, have derided Stump as a rank storyteller and post-mortem assassin.

Will the real Ty Cobb please stand up?

It’s beyond the scope of this book review to determine whether Stump was a teller of uncomfortable truths or a purveyor of crap. My interest in Cobb: A Biography is the in-book narrative itself. True or false, does it work as a plausible account of a famous life? Does it jibe with the known record on the most obvious points? Does it entertain?

I didn’t expect to write this when I began re-reading this book, but the answers to all three questions are the same: Yes.

Cobb: A Biography is not a great read. At times, it isn’t even a good one. But its singularly fascinating title character grabs you by the throat from the first page and never lets go.

Cobb, by Stump’s account, is a functional psychopath who started out in baseball as an abuse magnet for often-jealous teammates. This became the fuel that drove his combative approach to the game. This section of Stump’s book pulls you in with Cobb the same way Mario Puzo did with the Corleones. He’s a terrible husband, a violent racist, and an aging alcoholic, but with all that, draws your empathy and respect.

Long after his tempestuous 24-year major-league career came to its terminus in 1928, he still fumed about baseball being seen as anything other than total war: “I can’t believe the hearts-and-flowers stuff I see in modern baseball. Rivals practically stroll arm-in-arm. A runner on first base chats back and forth with the baseman. Hitters ask catchers how they’re feeling, and not to distract them. Off the field they play cards, have drinks together. The feuding, combative spirit that made the game idolized is washed up now. Pro football, where they don’t kiss each other, is taking over as the No. 1 sport. For shame.”

Ty Cobb exchanges greetings with St. Louis Browns catcher Paul Krichell in 1912. According to Al Stump, Cobb was rumored to sharpen the spikes of his cleats before games. Cobb always denied it. Image from https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/5x0qdd/ty_cobb_sliding_into_home/ 

Stump’s biography begins with an account of the author meeting Cobb sometime in 1960, the last full year of Cobb’s life. A magazine writer for manly men’s journals like True magazine, Stump had been hired to ghostwrite Cobb’s autobiography.

By this point, Cobb was a sick man, physically as well as mentally. Despite enduring a prostatectomy and diabetes, Cobb still drank heavily, even sneaking whiskey into the hospital under cover of a denture glass. Still, he badgered Stump to drive out with him in a blizzard so he could shoot some craps and rub elbows with Joe DiMaggio.

“If you and I are going to get along,” he told Stump, “don’t increase my tension.”

In Stump’s account, people always did. Once, when he was a young ballplayer sharing a room, he pulled his roomie pink and naked out of a warm bath Cobb wanted for himself. “I’ve got to be first at everything – all the time,” Cobb exclaimed.

According to Stump, Cobb called himself in these early years “a steel spring with a dangerous flaw.” That moment of surprisingly naked introspection from terse Cobb made me wonder if Stump, as his critics charge, dressed up facts for a better story.

There are other huh moments. At one point, Stump talks about Cobb being visited by one of his few baseball buddies, Casey Stengel. Stengel tells of his new job managing the Mets. Cobb warns Stengel they don’t have any players. Cobb died in July, 1961, almost a year before the Mets first took the field. How does he know this?

Stump’s stories of Cobb the violent racist stand out for their frequency and savagery. We learn of him attacking a black hotel detective to the point of near-murder. On another occasion, Cobb attacks a black groundskeeper at a game for trying to shake his hand, and then rounds on the man’s wife when she tries to intervene.

“Cobb slammed the woman to her knees and began choking her insanely,” Stump writes. I guess that’s a better adverb than “rationally”; here and elsewhere Stump’s clenched tone had me wondering.

Stump’s critics charge the biography is on especially shaky ground regarding Cobb as violent racist. Leerhsen researched the assault on the detective and discovered he wasn’t black. Cobb was a Southerner, but Leerhsen claims he came from a family of abolitionists and didn’t make himself conspicuous as a racist. Later on, he even spoke out for integration, in baseball and everywhere else.

I don’t know how much of Leerhsen’s kinder, gentler Cobb I’m ready to buy. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and too much smoke predates this book’s 1994 pub date to blame Stump like Leerhsen does.

When I first read this book, several years ago, I found Stump by turns shrill and vague. Re-reading this left me feeling that way again, yet at the same time I enjoyed it more than I expected.

Cobb’s is just a great story, that of a man who came to baseball just as it was coming into the foreground of the American experience, and transformed it into something both strategic and raw. Stump draws this out in a way that fits into his Cobb-as-beast narrative.

For Stump, the secret to Cobb’s success was pure aggression:

On offense you had fewer ways to fail after putting the ball in play. Therefore: Attack, with the confidence that the odds are with you. Attack, attack – always attack. Once you put the ball in play, the defense has to retire you. Make them throw it. Let them beat themselves with a mistake.

In Cobb’s rookie season, which began late in 1905 when he was just 18, he hit a measly .240. He was still learning the game. Every year after, he hit over .300. He won 12 batting titles, was the all-time base-hit and base-stealing champ for decades after his retirement, still holds the record for stealing home, and over the course of four consecutive seasons, from 1910 to 1913, hit over .400. His career batting average of .366 has never been equaled.

It was Cobb’s misfortune to arrive a decade before Babe Ruth changed baseball as profoundly as Cobb, and even more robustly. Ruth was the home-run king to Cobb’s Napoleon of singles, a thoroughly loveable maverick who wound up serving chroniclers of the era as placid yang to Cobb’s tortured yin.

Naturally Cobb hated him for it.

Stump has Cobb sneering at Ruth, calling him black (Cobb’s favorite insult, according to Stump), bumping him in games, and being as obnoxious as possible. Even after their careers ended, Cobb still couldn’t resist gamesmanship on the golf course, puffing away at a big cigar whenever Ruth lined up a shot.

Reading Al Stump's biography, you might think Ty Cobb would have minded this sort of thing from the Babe more than he appears to here. Image from https://www.si.com/mlb/2015/05/08/book-excerpt-ty-cobb-babe-ruth-detroit-tigers-charles-leerhsen.

Ruth drew headlines, and greater lasting fame, yet Cobb had his champions. “It’s a bomb against a machine gun,” Stengel said. Ruth had explosive power, but Cobb’s attack was constant and merciless.

For all his success as an individual player, Cobb unlike Ruth never won a World Series. His Tigers played in three consecutive Series, from 1907 to 1909, yet lost each time. You get the feeling from Stump the big problem was Cobb, sowing dissent and looking out for himself at the expense of the team.

Cobb was still associated with success. The Detroit News commented on one of his many disputes as follows:

“You can’t beat Terrible Ty with a club. If he fell off the Ford Building here he’d land on his feet unhurt. If he fell into the Hudson River he’d come out with baskets full of fish. He’d taken more chances of breaking his neck than anyone who ever played the game and the injuries have been received by the other fellow.”

Stump’s Cobb is an indomitable force, the like of which baseball has never seen again. Others might say that’s because baseball didn’t quite see such a character even when Cobb was playing. I believe they have a point, but Cobb: A Biography wound up being at worst a guilty pleasure for me.