Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood

How should we remember Ty Cobb, the peerless and fearless centerfielder who spent most of his twenty-four year career (1905–1928) playing for the Detroit Tigers? Should we remember the numbers? When he retired, he held forty-three major league regular season and career records, including a .367 career batting average and 4,191 hits. By any athletic measurement, he fully merited induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in its initial balloting. Alternatively, should we remember his behavior on and off the diamond? His battles with opposing players and teammates, his penchant for turning petty disagreements into violent encounters, his habitual and pathological racism? In an age when major league baseball was lily white and acts of casual racism by owners, players, and fans were common, Tyrus Raymond Cobb's actions stood out as singularly virulent. Once in spring training early in his career, he slapped a black grounds keeper who presumed the right to shake his hand. When the grounds keeper's wife tried to intervene, Cobb slammed her to the ground. On other occasions, he punched and kicked other black women for what he interpreted as offensives to his honor (such as taking umbrage at one of his racist insults

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