Major League Error

Why baseball fans have long thought Ty Cobb to be a racist when he wasn't

- CHARLES LEERHSEN

WE LIVE IN A TIME WHEN VILLAINS never seem to get their comeuppance. So the recent news that Major League Baseball had re-crunched its trove of statistics and taken the legendary Ty Cobb down a notch from first to second place among all-time batting champs had many sports fans celebrating. Cobb, who played mostly for the Detroit Tigers from 1905 to 1928, was a pioneering superstar who had an astounding lifetime batting average of .367-until recently considered unsurpassable. He was also the most exciting player of his era, once stealing second, third and home on three consecutive pitches and on another occasion turning a squibbler back to the pitcher into an inside-the-park home run.

But the Georgia Peach, as he was known in his day, also owns a reputation as a thoroughly despicable human being (it was said that he sharpened his spikes and kept them high when sliding into opposing infielders) and, most of all, a virulent racist. Rumor had it that he'd once stabbed a Black hotel clerk whose attitude he didn't fancy. A baseball historian wrote that Cobb "brutally pistol-whipped African-American men" on the street. Cobb was insulted in the movie Field of Dreams ("None of us could stand the son of a bitch," one character said), depicted as a sexual predator in the 1995 biopic Cobb starring Tommy Lee Jones, and decried in the Ken Burns documentary Baseball as "an embarrassment to the game." In the long history of America's National Pastime, it's safe to say that no player has been more despised.