Draft Ty Cobb On Your Fantasy Team Part II
By Stephen Turk
When I think of fundamental baseball, I think of the old style of play. And when I think of the old style of play, I think about hard nosed grinding. I think of going out there and getting it done any way possible, stealing bases, railroading guys in the base paths, getting whatever foreign substance on the ball that can be gotten away with. I certainly don’t think about hitting the ball over the fence and keeping the uniform clean. Down and dirty was the way Ty Cobb played the game, and he was the best.
Yeah! That’s what I think about when talking about hard nosed baseball! Drop kicking a catcher directly in the groin area! That’s Cobb at his best.
Tyrus Raymond Cobb was a Detroit Tiger for all but the last two of his incredible 24 year career. He made his debut in 1905 and didn’t put down his bat until 1928. In that time he was just about everything anyone could ask for on the field; the perfect distillation of the baseball that had been played to that point.
Statistically speaking, his first few seasons were a little shaky, but it didn’t take long for him to make an impact. In fact, the batting average for his first year (in which he only played 41 games) was his lowest, and is the only one with a two as the first number.
Cobb hit over .400 three times in his career, including a high of .420 in 1911 (the very next year he dipped to .409). This was all happening during what is known as the deadball era, by the way, and for comparison, in the so called juiced ball era no one has hit .400. In addition to hitting prowess, Cobb was a proficient base stealer, swiping a prolific 96 in 1915, while also walking 118 times, and racking up a .486 on-base percentage in the process. That basically means in 1915, watching the Tigers, you had nearly even odds of seeing Cobb on the base paths. If you could draft him on a fantasy team, he’d get you about a million points.
For all of this, Cobb had season highs in homeruns of 12, a feat he achieved twice. Both only after Babe Ruth came on to the scene. Finding all this out, initially I was shocked that I hadn’t known more about Cobb, I was a bit saddened that he had done so much, yet for anyone who wasn’t totally in to sports, Ruth was the only man they knew about. But then I learned that much of the harm to Cobb’s reputation was his own doing.
He is remembered as a racist, a poor teammate, and an all around reclusive abrasive personality. He was a baseball player cut from the cloth of a fearless competitor, not a sports celebrity. No one knew what a sports celebrity could be until Babe Ruth. Cobb was ever the grinder, however, a picture of athletic ability who retired wealthy and played into his forties, and no one amount of homeruns could ever change that.
Ruth’s star rose as Cobb’s fell, even though his production remained high. The two men were inducted into the Hall of Fame as part of the inaugural class. And so baseball history moved on.
There have been plenty of great players since that first batch. Ruth’s style: high powered, visible, and larger than life, became the mold and Cobb’s style has been criticized and fallen out of favor. Certainly with the scrutiny that pro athletes go through today, Cobb would likely be roundly disliked regardless of talent. Nonetheless here we are today, homeruns down, the game trying to recover from disgrace, and people suffering from athlete overexposure. I just have to wonder if maybe we are going to see the start of a new era, if baseball players will channel more Cobb than Ruth as the game goes on.
That’s a link to a good article about Cobb
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