Baseball “historian” Daniel Okrent righteously denounced American icon and baseball great Ty Cobb in Ken Burns’ Baseball miniseries:

“Cobb is the great black mark on the history of baseball … he was a man of vile temperament and vile habit … I think that Ty Cobb in his totality is an embarrassment to baseball.”
—Third Inning, “The Black Mark”

Some people just have no sense of historical context; even some people who call themselves “historians”.

I wonder whether Daniel Okrent realizes that there were a few other racists in America in Cobb’s time. Does he realize there might have been a few in Cobb’s home state of Georgia during the Post-Reconstruction Era? I wonder whether Okrent has seen the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. It might remind him just how racist a place America very recently was.

I wonder whether Okrent is aware that Major League Baseball was itself an all-white organization long before and long after Cobb.

I wonder whether Okrent has ever heard of the Black Sox scandal, and how it nearly ruined baseball. As far as I know, Cobb never threw a baseball game. It doesn’t really seem to have been his style, really. He was too competitive.

Cobb was a vile racist. Cobb was a violent bully. Cobb was a ruthless competitor. Cobb was a shameless self-promoter. Cobb was a Coca-cola investor.

Can one imagine a more All-American resume?

Cobb’s mother shot his father.

Good. Now we have guns in the story. Can one imagine a more All-American upbringing?

Yes, it’s true that Ty Cobb assaulted a handicapped heckler. How very politically incorrect of him! How insensitive to the underprivileged! I suppose he would also hit a girl or even a bespectacled girl! This was no “Christian gentleman”.

But it is also said that Ty Cobb paid Shoeless Joe Jackson a visit in Jackson’s hometown of Greenville, SC after Jackson had been expelled from Baseball. Imagine that: compassion? Could Cobb have been human after all?

Ty Cobb was a remarkable man. He wasn’t anybody’s hero, but he was an American phenomenon, and a phenomenon worthy of awe.

Further Reading

Tom Stanton: Cobb was nicer than most people think.

He could have contented himself with stardom, but he had to go out and try to break the last great American monopoly, Major League Baseball.

“I am pleased that God made my skin black — but I wish He had made it thicker.” —Curt Flood As a kid I was, for some mysterious reason, a fan of the Saint Louis Cardinals. When I gave my heart to Baseball in the mid-1970s, I lived thousands of miles from Saint Louis and the Redbirds were mediocre, but it may be that I absorbed some subconscious reverence for the team from overhearing the San Francisco Giants games and sports talk shows playing on Dad’s radio.

“Baseball’s Best Centerfielder”

I was raised with the certain knowledge that Willie Mays was the greatest baseball player ever, and that the Giants were miserably hopeless. That was just Dad’s way of being a baseball addict. It seems like baseball has always been a bad trip for him, but that rarely stopped him from listening in on a game.

It seemed like he had nothing bad to say about the Cardinals. Maybe that’s why I became a Cards fan rather than a Giants fan. Maybe it was those glowing red and white home uniforms. Names like Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, and Lou Brock shone in the firmament of my childhood; though not quite so brightly as Mays.

Some seem to have believed that Curt Flood was a better defensive centerfielder than Mays. That’s saying a lot.

I don’t remember hearing much if anything about Flood. He was a masterful centerfielder and embattled player activist, who left Major League Baseball long before my dad and little brother converted me. Until recently, I had no idea what he went through. The old stories of American racial hatred never cease to shock me.

By 1957, my second year in the South, I thought I was beyond crying, but one day we were playing a double-header…And…after the end of the first game you take your uniform off and you throw it into a big pile and the clubhouse manager, he comes and he gets your uniform and he drys them and he cleans them and then you play the second game with the same uniform…I, like everybody else, I threw my uniform right into the big pile with everybody else’s and the clubhouse guy came by with one of these long sticks with a nail on it and he very carefully picked my uniform out from the white guys uniforms and my little sweatshirt and my little jock strap and everything. Sent my uniform to the colored cleaners which was probably 20 minutes away and there I sat while all the other guys were on the field. [The crowd has] really been giving me hell all day long, and now I’m sitting there stark naked waiting for my uniform to come back from the cleaners and the other guys were out on the field. So finally they get my uniform back and I walk out on the field . . . boy you’d think that I had just burned the American Flag.

Curt Flood, Ken Burns’ Baseball, Seventh Inning.

Story: Flood Is at Peace With His Lost Career

The Bahá’í Faith drove many of the big decisions in our family, and I’m certain that much of Mom and Dad’s time was dedicated to the Faith, yet I can’t remember much, if anything, about the Bahá’í Faith from our time in Walterboro. Maybe I was too young to be involved in all that.

I do remember that one of the neighbor kids had been named Jesse Owens.

Perhaps the most prominent event from our time in Walterboro, as far as my five-year-old mind could gather, was the day when everybody seemed to be talking about Joe Frazier, a local boy from Beaufort, and Cassius Clay (who had taken the name “Muhammad Ali” years before). As far as I can recall, there was a fight between the two names, and the name “Cassius Clay” had won the fight, but I later discovered that I had got it wrong.

I used to shrug at that memory, thinking of it as a historically meaningless sporting event, bemused by the fact that I had remembered the loser as the winner, but over the years I have come to realize that Ali may have been among the most influential men of the time. What could we Bahá’ís, with all of our enlightened racial profiling and spiritual bureaucracy, do for Black America that this man could not do with his skill, intelligence, adaptability, toughness, political courage, and poetic hubris? Here was a new breed of exemplar for the ever-so-humble American Negro: “no Vietcong ever called me nigger.”

By the way, you may be wondering where Ali got his quick step and gift of gab. You guessed it: he’s Irish.