MLB 2025 Season

eeriepadave said:

Angel Hernandez retiring.

https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2024/05/27/angel-hernandez-is-retiring/

eeriepadave said:

https://www.mlb.com/news/faq-negro-leagues-stats-major-league-record

Johnny Abruzzo said:

Ledbetterman10 said:

eeriepadave said:

https://www.mlb.com/news/faq-negro-leagues-stats-major-league-record

Ty Cobb’s family is probably so pissed at Derek Chauvin right now. 

Haha

I would hope even his family is fairly embarrassed about his blatant racism. Don’t think he is career leader in anything now. 😀🥂

Johnny Abruzzo said:

Dang that Cardinals bullpen is smoke. Look out if that team squeaks into the playoffs.

Johnny Abruzzo said:

Ledbetterman10 said:

eeriepadave said:

https://www.mlb.com/news/faq-negro-leagues-stats-major-league-record

Ty Cobb’s family is probably so pissed at Derek Chauvin right now. 

Haha

I would hope even his family is fairly embarrassed about his blatant racism. Don’t think he is career leader in anything now. 😀🥂

But Burns, like so many others, was letting himself be misled by the oft-repeated myth. Looking into census reports, birth certificates, and contemporary newspaper accounts, I found that all three of the black fighters cited by Charles Alexander were in fact white. Yes, Cobb had also fought with two black men during his life, but those fights didn’t have racial overtones, and Cobb—who had an extremely thin skin—fought with many more white men. So how did such a distinguished author make such obvious mistakes? When I asked Alexander about this, he simply replied, “I went with the best information I had at the time.”

But what about Cobb’s 19th-century Southern roots? How could someone born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? What I found—and again, not because I am the Babe Ruth of researchers, but because I actually did some research—is that Ty Cobb was descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob.

Cobb himself was never asked about segregation until 1952, when the Texas League was integrating, and Sporting News asked him what he thought. “The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly,” he said. “The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and whose [sic] to say he has not?” By that time he had attended many Negro league games, sometimes throwing out the first ball and often sitting in the dugout with the players. He is quoted as saying that Willie Mays was the only modern-day player he’d pay to see and that Roy Campanella was the ballplayer that reminded him most of himself.

Cobb was, like the rest of us, a highly imperfect human being. He was too quick to take offense and too intolerant of those who didn’t strive for excellence with the over-the-top zeal that he did. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he thought too many others fools. He was the first baseball celebrity, and he did not always handle well the responsibilities that came with that. And yes, he once went into the stands and repeatedly punched a man who had been heckling him for more than a year, and who turned out to have less than the full complement of fingers—hence the story of him attacking a handicapped fan. This is a mark against him. But was he a racist and an embarrassment to the game? Far from it.

More of the quote and context:

 Five years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, Cobb publicly supported blacks and whites playing baseball together, adding, "Certainly it is okay for them to play. I see no reason in the world why we shouldn't compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man; in my book that goes not only for baseball but in all walks of life."Using even stronger language, Cobb told the Sporting News in 1952 that "the Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly." In 1953, black newspapers cited his praise for Brooklyn Dodgers' catcher Roy Campanella, who Cobb said was "among the all-time best catchers" in baseball. Following Campanella's accident that left him paralyzed, the Dodgers staged a tribute game where tens of thousands of spectators silently held lit matches above their heads. Cobb wrote the Dodgers owner to show appreciation "for what you did for this fine man". Cobb also stated that Willie Mays was the "only player I'd pay money to see". In the obituaries that ran in the black press following Cobb's death, he was praised for "[speaking] in favor of racial freedom in baseball".