Say It Ain't So...

Major League Baseball's Mount Rushmore.

Pictured top row, left to right: Honus Wagner, Gover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Napolion Lajoie, George Sissler, Walter Johnson.

Bottom row: Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Cy Young.

By purely photographic standards, this is not the greatest baseball photograph ever made. That honor in my humble opinion would have to go to Charles Conlon's remarkable picture of Ty Cobb giving all 110 percent of himself sliding into third, sending New York Highlander (Yankee) third baseman Jimmy Austin airborne in his futile attempt to tag out the redoubtable "Georgia Peach", as umpire Silk O'Laughlin gets himself into position in the background to make the call. 

Click here to see the familiar, highly cropped version of the photo. 

But no less remarkable at least as a historical document is this portrait of nine old men at the Major League Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the first such event in Cooperstown, New York on Jun 12, 1939. At the very least, three of those pictured above represent what would have to be considered part of baseball's equivalent of Mount Rushmore. All the rest would be close runners up.

The question of who belongs and who doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame is probably the most frequent topic of debate among baseball people, and even this esteemed group has its detractors, at the very least in the sense of omission.

So who is not in this photo that should be?

First and foremost is a group of perhaps an equal number of players who weren't allowed to play in the major leagues because of the color of their skin. One might consider the following:

• Shortstop John Henry "Pop" Lloyd
• Catcher Louis Santop
• Outfielder Pete Hill
• Pitcher José Méndez
• First Baseman and manager Ben Taylor
• Outfielder Cristóbal Torriente
• Second Baseman Frank Grant
• Infielder/Executive/Historian Sol White
• Pitcher/Manager/Executive Rube Foster

It wouldn't be until 1971 that a player was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame solely based upon his career in what became known collectively as the "Negro Leagues." Fortunately the irony of the original plan to honor these men and one woman of the game in a "separate but equal" room in Cooperstown was not lost on what today would be called the "woke" crowd, who in a much different day and age, were not excoriated for believing that everybody deserves to be treated equally and fairly. 

To date there are 35 Negro League players and two non-player executives enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. There should be more.

Nevertheless, the nine players listed above, all eventually inducted into the Hall of Fame for their contributions to the game of baseball, ended their playing careers at least five years before the event pictured at Cooperstown, which would have made them eligible for the "Class of '39". 

One might argue that it is impossible to compare these players to "Major Leaguers" because they didn't get the chance to complete against them. 

But they did, not in officially sanctioned MLB games, but in countless exhibition games which became discouraged by MLB executives because the teams made up of black players usually won. For their part, most big-league stars understood the undeniable fact that Major League Baseball of their time, did not represent the best ballplayers, but only a fraction of them.

Babe Ruth was one of those players who understood.

Ted Williams was another. In his induction speech at the Hall of Fame in 1966, the "Splendid Splinter" said this:

...I've always been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, to have struck out or hit a tape major home run. And I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol, the great Negro players that are not here, only because they were not given a chance.

It is said that speech was one of the driving forces behind admitting Negro League players into the Hall. Still, it took five years. On the other hand, we should be thankful for that because given today's animus toward diversity, equity and inclusion, had they waited until our time, it might never have happened.

OK that had to be said, I'm off my soapbox now.

Who else isn't in that photo? Well, the aforementioned Ty Cobb of course, who was part of the group, perhaps the fourth face on baseball's Mount Rushmore along with Cy Young, Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth. Personally, I'd put Walter Johnson up there too but that would make five. I'm OK with that.

Ty Cobb isn't in the photo because he showed up late that day.

Anyone else?

Ok now to the intended topic of this post.

Portrait of Joe Jackson by Charles Conlon, 1913

A lot of folks believe that one of the greatest injustices of the game is the fact that "Shoeless" Joe Jackson wasn't there. He still isn't.  

That may not be for long as Major League Baseball has just reinstated Jackson along with seven of his teammates from the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox team who conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series that year. That means Jackson will be eligible to be voted into the Hall in 2028 by a special group of electors called the "Historical Overview Committee" made up of baseball historians and veteran members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Jackson certainly has to be ranked among the greatest hitters in the game, ending up with a career batting average of .356, placing him in fourth place in that category among MLB and Negro League players. *

No less than Ty Cobb AND Babe Ruth both credited Jackson for inspiring their own approach to hitting. Here's what Cobb allegedly once told Jackson:

Whenever I got the idea I was a good hitter, I'd stop and take a look at you. Then I knew I could stand some improvement.

And here's Babe Ruth on Shoeless Joe:

Babe Ruth and Joe Jackson, 1920

I copied Jackson's style because I thought he was the greatest hitter I had ever seen, the greatest natural hitter I ever saw. He's the guy who made me a hitter.

Were it not for Jackson's decision to accept money from gamblers and not do everything he could to help win the World Series for his team, its fans and its city, Joe Jackson would have certainly been standing with the likes of the Rushmore crowd in that photograph. 

This is an account of his prowess as the most naturally gifted, if not necessarily the smartest player of his time, written in 1916 by F.C. Lane and introduced by the official historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn.

Here's a little taste of the piece: 

Joe Jackson had simply native gifts, which, in themselves, have never been equaled. It was as natural for him to hit a baseball as it was for his early forebears to hit a squirrel in the eye at a hundred yards.

Gambling had always been a part of the game, there's no argument that gambling is what made baseball, like horse racing and boxing, a popular spectator sport in the first place. And paying off players to not do their best to win had also been around for a good long time. It was fairly well established that members of the 1918 Chicago Cubs were paid to throw that series against Boston, allegedly inspiring the members of their crosstown rivals to do the same the following year. And that Cubs team was not the first accused to having thrown a World Series by a long shot. 

To paraphrase the Chicago author Studs Terkel, while the 1919 White Sox may not have been the most corrupt team in baseball, they were hands down the most theatrically corrupt. 

And like all good theater, the drama of the 1919 World Series that has been handed down to us over the ages, is a mixture of some facts for plausibility's sake, mixed in with whole lot of fiction to keep it interesting.

Studs Terkel had a small role in the John Sayles film Eight Men Out which was based on the 1963 novel of the same name, written by Elliot Asinov. While the novel and subsequent film were one of many popular accounts of the Black Sox Scandal over the years, for some reason the film and especially the book are unfortunately considered by many (including so called "America's historian" Ken Burns) to be the definitive word on the subject. This despite the fact that the book's author made no claim his was a work of serious historical inquiry, and openly admitted having invented key elements of the story. **

Here is a piece published by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) highlighting the myths about the scandal which were promoted in the book and movie.

The most enduring myth promoted in the book is laying the weight of the blame on the whole sordid affair not on the players, but at the feet of their boss, owner and founder of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey. 

I won't go into it here as I wrote an entire post on the subject, except to say that this line from the book referring to the 1919 Sox...

No players of comparable talent on other teams were paid as little.

...which was repeated almost verbatim in Ken Burns's epic PBS docudrama titled Baseball, has absolutely no basis in fact. 

Research involving the unearthing of player-salary cards from the era, has discovered that the 1919 White Sox team had one of the highest team payrolls in baseball and most of their players had higher salaries than comparable players on other teams. 

The argument that the players were justified in their actions in order to recoup what was due them because they were vastly underpaid, is simply not true. 

So why did they do it?

This might give you an idea. Joe Jackson admitted that he was offered $20,000 (more than three times his salary***) for his part in the fix. He then complained bitterly AND publicly under oath that he only got $5,000 from the gangsters. 

Of course it was for the money, the players just wanted more of it, a lot more. 

Those in the know had an inkling something was suspicious before the series even started as the odds for the highly favored White Sox against the Cincinnati Reds went down precipitously shortly before the first game. Some uncharacteristically sloppy play in the field and sub-par pitching, convinced the cognoscenti, including the great Christy Matthewson **** who was covering the game from the press box, that the fix was in. 

Nearly a year would pass before the whole thing blew up. As the Sox were heading toward another possible American League pennant, the case of the eight Sox players was brought before a grand jury in Chicago. In the meantime, one of the gamblers involved, Billy Mahrag spilled the beans to reporters in Philadelphia that games 1, 2 and 8 of the best of nine series had been compromised. 

With the cat out of the bag and feeling the heat, four of the eight players including Jackson, confessed their role in the scheme to the grand jury. The following year, Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch, Lefty Williams, Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson found themselves in a courtroom in Chicago as defendants in a criminal case, charged with conspiracy to commit fraud. 

If you're interested and all you know about the trial is based on Eight Men Out, please do yourself a favor and read this.

Despite the confessions of half the defendants (which contrary to the book, were indeed presented to the jury), and other damning evidence against the players, the jury came in with a not-guilty verdict. The evening after the verdict was read, the jurors, twelve men all from Chicago, joined the players in a celebratory dinner at a local restaurant. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

But the celebration was short lived. The next day, the newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, (a position created as a response to the Black Sox affair,) Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight players for life from the game. In his ruling, Landis said:

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.

Something I just learned is that the Landis ruling didn't extend to Hall of Fame inductions until 1991 when "The Pete Rose Rule" prohibiting players banned from the game from consideration for admission into the hallowed hall was adopted. It turns out that Jackson's name was on the ballot twice, in 1936 and 1940. Obviously, he was not voted in. 

The Landis ruling was intended to be a lifetime ban, but I don't know how much consideration was made about it being a ban for eternity. As all members of the 1919 White Sox are long gone, they continued to be on the ineligible list until this month when the current commissioner Rob Manfred lifted the ban on all deceased players. Claiming that dead players no longer pose a threat to the game (yes he really did say that), this leaves the door open to Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, who seem rightly or wrongly forever joined at the hip in their ignominy, to have the chance to be considered entrance into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

Whew, that was a long way to get to what I intended to be the crux of this post which is, drum roll please...

...should they be let in?

I have to admit that, as my friend Rich with whom I discussed this issue before starting writing this piece will testify, I was on the fence.

I no longer am.

This is the simple answer: it all depends what you want the Hall of Fame to be.

Here are the reasons I keep hearing why Joe Jackson should be inducted into the Hall of Fame:

There are lots of players currently in the Hall of Fame who have done worse things than Joe Jackson.

Look I get it, induction into the Hall of Fame is not the equivalent of the canonization process in the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of Bill Veeck:

Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober. 

The players in the picture at the top of this post, with the possible exceptions of Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson, were flawed men. In addition to "Old Pete" Alexander's problems with the sauce,  Tris Speaker allegedly had Klan ties, Babe Ruth was a rake, and Eddie Collins (also a member of the 1919 White Sox) as general manager of the Red Sox, was instrumental in preventing black players from joining the team. And Ty Cobb, part of the group not in the picture had anger issues*****.

So who cares? One could say all that matters is how a player performed on the field. The thing is, we have stats and record books and infinite other reams of information and their extrapolations to tell us the story of how good a player was on the field. One would expect that an institution like the Hall of Fame would have loftier goals than a mere record book or computer printout. In my mind, an institution such as that should exist to honor and celebrate a player's contributions to the game in addition to the numbers he put up.

Conversely, there should be repercussions to a player's compromising the game. Joe Jackson's numbers were staggering, that much is true. On the other hand, intentionally setting out to lose a game, much worse, the World Series for personal profit, goes against the very spirit of the enterprise an athlete dedicates his or her life to. In my mind, there is no more serious betrayal of the game then that. In other words, cheating to win is very bad, but cheating to lose is worse.

I work in the curatorial department of an art museum, and the enterprise I have devoted much of my life to is the care and protection of the objects in our collection. I could very easily take one of those objects, one that would probably not be missed for a long time, and sell it to make up for the amount I consider to be lacking in my compensation. 

You might say that an athlete intentionally trying to lose is not stealing, but it really is. Because the most important thing a team has to offer, is the trust it provides to its fans. Trust that their players and everyone involved with the team will do everything within their power to play well and honorably, even if it results in a loss. Once that trust is broken, it is very hard to restore. 

Which is exactly what the eight players of the 1919 White Sox did. And the cost to the team was staggering, they would not win another pennant or even come close until 1959. 

But Joe Jackson's stats during the 1919 Series show that he didn't slack up a bit, that he was really playing to win. On top of that, he didn't participate in any of the meetings with the gamblers. 

First of all, the second point doesn't matter. By accepting money from the gamblers, which he certainly did, Jackson made it crystal clear to his fellow players that he was a part of the fix, even more so as the team's undisputed star, which further emboldened his teammates to do what they had to do to throw games. 

Second, Joe Jackson's overall stats from the 1919 World Series don't tell the whole story. If you read the F.C.Lane article I posted above, you know that in addition to being an exceptional hitter, Jackson was also an outstanding outfielder with great speed and a cannon for an arm. In games one and two, he allowed two well hit balls to get by him resulting in triples and eventually runs which proved to be the difference in the games. Now triples hit to left field are fairly uncommon in the big leagues as the left fielder has a much easier throw to third base than either a right or center fielder.  Misplays like these don't make it into the box score, as errors are only recorded when a fielder touches the ball. If a fielder doesn't make it to the ball, no error, and no record of an inept play. These aren't exactly smoking guns, but they were enough to make folks in the know like Christy Mathewson suspicious.

Jackson hit well in the series, but much better in the games that were on the up and up. In the games the Sox were supposed to lose, his hits came usually when there was no one on base, or when the game was already out of hand. When there were runners on base and he had the chance to make a difference in the game, crickets. 

Baseball can't just erase Joe Jackson from the game.

Refusing to bestow a player with the highest honor possible in the game hardly constitutes erasing the player from the game, in fact in this case, just the opposite. Joe Jackson's travails have raised him to folk hero status. Heck there's even a library and museum dedicated to him. I'd venture to say that of the nine men in the picture above, with the exception of Babe Ruth and Cy Young (because of the award named after him), the name Shoeless Joe Jackson is more familiar to the general public than all the rest combined PLUS the Negro League stars thrown in for good measure. I think it's unlikely that were it not for his involvement in Black Sox Scandal and his banishment from the game, he'd be remembered today by anyone other than students of the game.

Besides, no one has expunged his stats from the record book, they're there in all their glory for everyone who cares to see.

Jackson and his teammates were acquitted in a court of law but in a dictatorial move, Judge Landis banned them from the game anyway.

That is irrelevant. Even if you were to ignore the vagaries of the verdict, the burden of proof of guilt in a court of law is significantly higher than it is in the workplace. Back to the example of me hypothetically taking a piece of art from our collection, I could stand trial for theft but if the police fail to come up with the object, there's a good chance I'd be acquitted. However, if there's just enough evidence to convince my bosses that I stole the object, they could fire me in a heartbeat with no repercussions.

In the case of the Chicago 8, there was no question of their guilt. 

It's been over one hundred years, can't we just forgive and forget? Hasn't Joe Jackson been punished enough?

Forgive? Certainly, as they say, to err is human, to forgive, divine.

Forget? Certainly not. That would be saying cheating the game and its fans for personal profit is AOK as long as it was long enough ago and the player put up good enough numbers. 

---

MY VERDICT (for what it's worth)

I think it is right and just that the ban on Joe Jackson and his fellow deceased players has been lifted as no one deserves to be condemned for eternity. Well, I can think of a few people who need no mention, but they weren't ballplayers. 

And I think it's a good thing that Jackson will now be eligible to be on the ballot for possible induction in the Hall of Fame.

But do I think Joe Jackson belongs there?

I know many people with strong opinions on the subject will no doubt think: "say it ain't so Jim" but...

No, he doesn't.

Neither does Pete Rose.

Sorry.

Notes:

*In 2024, Major League Baseball included Negro League stats in its official tally of baseball records. That long awaited move is reflected in this list of the top five lifetime batting averages:

1) Ty Cobb 367

2) Oscar Charleston 365

3) Rogers Hornsby 359

4) Joe Jackson .356

5) Jud Wilson .350


**Elliot Azinov admitted that he invented the story of White Sox pitcher Lefty Williams being threatened by a hitman working for gangster Arthur Rothstein to either lose game eight (that year it was a best of nine series) in the first inning, or suffer dire consequences both for himself and his family. Asinov revealed that he made up the character of hitman Harry F. and his threat to Williams on the advice of his publisher to guard against copywrite infringement.


***In 1919, Joe Jackson's salary was $6000. That sounds like a paltry amount and it was considering he was the star of the team. But as I pointed out in my Charles Comiskey post, Jackson had a multi-year contract at that figure which Comiskey purchased from Cleveland, and he was under no obligation to increase the amount. There were other extenuating circumstances that made Comiskey especially loathe the idea of increasing Jackson's salary which you can read about here.

Nevertheless, in today's dollars, that $6000 would be equal to about $110,000, peanuts of course to what modern day ballplayers make, but not a bad wage, especially considering it's for only for a little over one half a year's work.

**** New York Giants pitcher Christy Matthewson, another candidate for baseball's Mount Rushmore status, was one of the original class of inductees into the hall of Fame in 1936. Sadly, "The Big Six" passed away much too early, in 1925.


*****One of the most agonizingly persistent myths of the game of baseball is the notion that in addition to his well-documented anger management issues, Ty Cobb was a racist-sociopath. That erroneous portrayal of him did not exist until well after his death, when an unscrupulous writer named Al Stump, unsatisfied by the response to his biography of the great ballplayer, decided to write a "tell-all" expose of his exploits with Cobb as he was gathering material for his book. The problem is, the writer made most of it up. You can read about it here. 

The Georgia Peach

Ty Cobb, left, and Joe Jackson.
Contrary to the quote from the movie, the two had a great mutual admiration.

Ty Cobb wanted to play...but none of us could stand the son-of-a-bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it.

-the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson from the film Field of Dreams

Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls then Babe Ruth could with a home run.

-Roger Birtwell

Yes, he's a prick, but he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit!

-Babe Ruth



The greatness of Ty Cobb was something to be seen... and to see him was to remember him forever.

-George Sisler


In 1994, Ken Burns released his epic, reverential ode to the national pastime, a documentary film titled simply, Baseball. It aired on PBS serendipitously at the same time as the longest strike in baseball history, the strike that forced the cancellation of the World Series. Consequently tens of millions of baseball-starved fans tuned in to watch the eighteen and one half hour film which covered the history of the game up to that point, broken up into nine chronological segments or innings as Burns called them, each inning devoted to a specific era of the game.

As is his custom, Burns employed several on camera "experts" who added bits and pieces of detail to the narrative of the story. One of those was writer, editor and passionate baseball fan, Daniel Okrent.

In the episode titled, Third Inning: the Faith of Fifty Million People, a segment was devoted to one of the greatest players in the history of the game. On that player, Okrent sanctimoniously proclaimed that Ty Cobb was "the great black mark on the history of baseball." Speaking matter-of-factly as if he personally knew the man, Okrent called Cobb "brutal" and " a terrible racist."

He continued: "The more his fires burned, the more that provoked him on the field, and I suppose one could say that the happy byproduct was the extraordinary baseball that he gave the fans at the time, but ... there's a moment when you have to say it's not worth it. I think that Ty Cobb in his totality is an embarrassment to baseball."

Much later in Burns's film, he has narrator John Chancellor proclaiming that Cobb was so despised, only three people associated with the game attended his funeral. "If I had to do it over again..." said Chancellor quoting Cobb, "...I'd have made more friends."

That last comment closing the final chapter on Cobb I suppose was an attempt to give a trace of humanity to the man after portraying him as the most inhuman person to ever set foot on a baseball diamond.

I knew about the great Detroit Tiger outfielder's bad reputation twenty one years ago when I first watched Burns's series in its entirety with my friend in his home in Brooklyn, but I never knew he was THAT bad. Not that there was anything original in Burns's portrayal of Cobb, I just had yet to read the biography of him by Al Stump.  Burns's treatment of Cobb made him look practically saintly compared to Stump who portrays Ty Cobb as a paranoid, sadistic, psychotic, racist, sociopath, who probably murdered one or two people along the way.

And that was on his good days.

Then there was the ridiculous bio-pic based loosely upon Stump's work where Tommy Lee Jones's portrayal of Cobb is virtually indistinguishable from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Fortunately for Cobb's reputation I suppose, Burns' film was seen by far more people than all the other scurrilous works on Ty Cobb combined, and for those like me, the final word on Cobb was that he was merely a run of the mill racist-asshole, rather than a bona fide monster.

I became intrigued with the idea that there was more to Cobb than meets the eye after reading the entry on him in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. While not denying the racist-asshole part, James's portrayal of Cobb is nuanced. He concludes his section on Cobb with this bit of home brew psychology:

Ty Cobb's racism and his anger I believe, were fueled not by smugness or even resentment, but by an unusually intense fear of his own limitations, No one is more macho than a man who feels inadequate,; no one walks straighter than a man who is half drunk. When Ty Cobb felt threatened he lashed out at the world. He felt threatened a lot-but as long as he wasn't challenged, he was a very nice man.

Nice man or not, in today's world we can forgive the occasional asshole, but there is zero tolerance for the racist.

Here's a little more insight into Ty Cobb's racism from the great Buck O'Neil:



Notice how Mr. O'Neil puts the interviewer in her place when she asks him why he doesn't condemn Ty Cobb for his racist ways.

Ty Cobb got into a lot of fights in his life, brutal, inexcusable bursts of violence, where his rage, along with his fists, feet or any other part of his body he could flail about, were directed sometimes even at women. Seldom did he pick a fight, but when he felt offended even in the slightest, he went ballistic. Some of his rage was directed at black people. Far more often it was directed at white people. Buck O'Neil was right, Ty Cobb could be mean to anyone, not just blacks. "That was Ty Cobb" he said.

Despite all the wisdom in O'Neil's comments, he did get a few things wrong. Ty Cobb did not come from a poor background, nor did he have only a fifth grade education. Cobb's family was comfortably middle class, and his father was an educator and later a state legislator who placed a very high value on his children's education. He pushed his firstborn, Tyrus Raymond, in the direction of either law or medical school, and discouraged young Ty from his passion of becoming a ballplayer, which at the time was considered a disreputable profession.

No one can say exactly what Ty Cobb was taught as a child about what his relationship with black people should be. True, he grew up in the post-Reconstruction South where anti-black sentiment was especially rampant, but his father in his role as legislator, fought for the rights of black people, and other ancestors were conscientious objectors during the Civil War because of their abolitionist beliefs.

After I saw this clip and read James's piece, I became interested in what made the man called "The Georgia Peach" tick. Searches on the web turned up numerous sites which addressed the question: "Was Ty Cobb a racist?" I thought, "well of course he was, everybody acknowledges that, even Bill James and Buck O'Neil."

Then I came across a quote from Ty Cobb. In 1952, reporters asked his opinion of African American Americans playing baseball with whites. This is what he said:

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 for baseball but for all walks of life...

The Negro should be accepted whole-heartedly and not grudgingly into baseball. The Negro has the right to professional baseball and who’s to say he has not?

To today's ears, Cobb's language sounds archaic, condescending and patronizing. Some claim his words are disingenuous as they were uttered twenty five years after Cobb retired from the game, and was no longer threatened by black players taking his job away. Others claim the words are meaningless because by the time Cobb made his comment, Jackie Robinson had been in the major leagues for five years and the integration of baseball by 1952 was a fait accompli.

But it must be remembered that in 1952, fewer than half of the teams in the major leagues had brought up a black player. It would be another seven years before every major league team had a black player on its roster. Several minor leagues in 1952 had yet to integrate at all. In 1952, the integration of baseball was still a hotly debated, emotional topic.

When Cobb made his comment, he was no longer affiliated with baseball, he was financially well off, and perfectly free to speak his mind. In 1952 there was hardly the stigma of being viewed as a racist as there is today. Personally Ty Cobb had little to gain by expressing his support of integration, while he had plenty to lose in terms of respect from many of his fellow Southerners. He chose not to mince his words or equivocate; his comments in support of the integration of baseball came out loud and clear, blasting, in the words of the Associated Press at the time, "a home run for the Negro player."

Cobb also was known to have attended several Negro League games often throwing out the first pitch and sitting in the dugout with the players. He also lavished praise on many of the black players who came up to the big leagues in the fifties and saved the biggest praise of all for Willie Mays who he said was the only ballplayer of any race he would pay to see play.

Cobb's are not the words and actions of a virulent racist. Considering the source, given the fact that they were uttered before most of the major milestones in American Civil Rights history, his words could be considered downright revolutionary. So what gives? Was Cobb trying to prove something, perhaps showing the world his softer side? Was he mellowing in old age, or was he in fact not as bad as we thought?

In his painstakingly researched new biography, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, author Charles Leerhsen attempts to answer that question by separating fact from fantasy.

Leerhsen's conclusion, and I don't think I'm giving too much away here, is that while a complex man capable of excessive violence as well as considerable benevolence, most of the really bad stuff that we associate with Cobb today, especially concerning his relationship with and feelings about black people, did not come to light until after he died in 1961. Ironically, the propagator of the ill will attributed to Ty Cobb after his death was none other than the man whom Ty Cobb hand picked to help write his autobiography. Cobb would learn shortly before he died that he picked the wrong man for the job.

That man was Al Stump.

Cobb's so called autobiography, My Life in Baseball: The True Record, ghost written by Stump, was published shortly after Ty Cobb died. Cobb's intention was to write a book that would set the record straight about his career, and put aside the common notion that he was a dirty ballplayer who routinely slid into bases sharpened spikes high, with the intention of maiming his opponents. In the end however, with little actual contact with Cobb, Stump wrote the book he (Stump) wanted to write, with a few concessions to his subject. Once he got hold of the manuscript after a long struggle with Stump, Cobb hated it and tried to sue to stop its publication. But it was too late, Cobb's health failed him and he died before he could do anything to stop the book.

At the time of his death, Ty Cobb, according to Leerhsen, was not a controversial figure and the sales of his ghost written autobiography were mild to say the least. Most of the comments on the book were about its inaccuracies. Then there was the book's voice. Leerhsen sites one passage from the Cobb autobiography which to him sounds more like the words of a "jaded sportswriter than an old ballplayer." You decide for yourself from this little tidbit about an alleged incident that was reported in the Ken Burns film as if it were God's honest truth:

No I didn't once attack Nap Rucker the pitcher in the bathroom and try to throw him out of the tub in which he was relaxing. That phony fable has dogged me for more than half a century and I doubt there are enough fans to fill a broom closet who don't believe it happened--which it never did. I don't know who constructed that particular piece of Limburger, but it has an odor I first concocted with certain New York writers--never exactly simpatico to me--who've made certain it appeared in every language but the Sanskrit.

Reading that made me sadly realize that my all time favorite Cobb quote also came from the autobiography and was written in exactly the same voice as the above passage:

Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded man. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, survival of the fittest.

Maybe it's the mollycoddle in me but I've read and listened to several interviews of Ty Cobb and have to say, as much as I want that to be Cobb himself speaking, that's just not him coming through those words.

Not satisfied with the paltry amount he made off the Cobb autobiography, Stump forged ahead with a new project that was sure to milk some money out of the dead ballplayer. That move, Leerhsen contends, "is the key to the destruction of Cobb's good name."

Stump followed up the book with the publication of an article describing his relationship with Cobb while the two men supposedly worked together on the "autobiography." If the public wants dirt, one can hear Stump's thoughts going through his head, "I'll give them dirt"

In the introduction to Stump's article reprinted in an anthology called "The Greatest Baseball Stories ever Told", the editor complained that the Cobb autobiography was "self-serving... a white wash from cover to cover..." and that "Cobb wrangled final approval over everything" (which come to think of it, as Cobb's supposed autobiography, wasn't that his prerogative?). Stump himself claimed that his conscience compelled him to show the public the "true" Cobb.

In 1962, Stump's article, Ty Cobb's Wild Ten Month Fight to Live, appeared in True, a men's adventure magazine. The article portrays Cobb in the last year of his life as a paranoid, pill popping, half-insane drunkard who never left home without carrying a huge amount of cash in a paper bag and a pistol. Stump claimed that when he told people of his book deal and his plans to spend time with Ty Cobb, in no uncertain terms he was told that he was taking his life into own his hands.

Stump's Cobb terrorized everyone he came in contact with, including the doctors and nurses who tended to him during his frequent visits to the hospital. Stump's Cobb also proudly boasted to the author that he killed a man in Detroit, one of three assailants in an armed robbery. In his story, after the three fled from an enraged Cobb after they stabbed him, the ballplayer followed one of his attackers into a dead end alley where proceeded to use his Belgian pistol (which wouldn't fire) to pistol whip the hapless would-be villain until:

 ...he had no face left. Left him there not breathing, in his own rotten blood. 

From there the ballplayer proceeded to catch a train for a ballgame he next day, where he happened to get three hits. It was only after the game when he got medical treatment for his stab wound.

On and on the article went relaying tales of hair-raising middle of the night journeys through snow covered mountain passes in order to satisfy one of Cobb's many whims like visiting Joe DiMaggio, or contest a payment on a measly check. Despite being a millionaire many times over, Stump's Cobb is a mean spirited tightwad who would remove (and re-use) the stamps on the self-addressed return envelopes from countless fan letters, before tossing the rest of the letters into the fire, as it saved on firewood.

In his article, Stump also elicited comments from contemporaries of Cobb, fellow ballplayers who insisted that Cobb was indeed as dirty a player as the rumors had him to be.

By doing so, Stump refuted virtually everything he wrote in his previous book on Cobb.

The article is a barn burner, a real page turner. The only problem according to Charles Leerhsen is that Al Stump made most of it up. Leerhrsen methodically debunks much of what Stump writes:

• According to Leerhsen, the doctors and nurses who treated Cobb during the last year of his life had nothing but good things to say about him. 
• Police reports from the city of Detroit have no record of a faceless body found in the city on the day Stump claimed Cobb killed the robber. 
• Ty Cobb was known for answering virtually all of his fan mail, sometimes even apologizing for being overly verbose in his responses. 
• Cobb also was very generous with his money, founding an educational fund and a hospital which both benefit the disadvantaged. 
• The ultimate debunker of the piece is that Stump more than likely only spent a couple of days alone with Ty Cobb, not the several months claimed in the article.

The above mentioned film titled Cobb, was loosely based upon the True article. It's maker, Ron Shelton, admitted that he added scenes that were not in the article. One particularly ghastly scene has Cobb attempting to rape a woman in Las Vegas, but is thwarted by his own impotence. When Charles Leerhsen asked Shelton about the scene, the writer-director told the author that he and his screenwriter (Stump), made the scene up because "it sounded like something Cobb would have done."

Another biography of Cobb came from a more respected source, professor of history Charles Alexander whose book, Ty Cobb, (where DO authors come up with such original titles?) was published in 1984. Unlike Stump's work, Alexander's is thoroughly researched and extensively foot noted. Unfortunately, many of Alexander's cited sources come from you guessed it, Stump's Cobb autobiography, which Stump himself refuted shortly after he wrote it. Alexander also cited numerous passages from the True article

Stump still wasn't done with Ty Cobb. He went on to write yet another biography published in 1994 called Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball. Stump begins that book by reprinting the True Magazine article, then goes on with the body of the book which brings up many of the ugly incidents in Ty Cobb's life but with a significant twist. The victims of virtually all of Cobb's violent acts in the new biography are black.

Leerhsen goes through all of the incidents cited by Stump and also Alexander, and finds that in the majority of them, the victims of Cobb's assaults were actually white. Leerhsen got his information either from checking birth certificates or by deducing that the lack of specific details of their race in news reports from the time (i.e.: no mention of them being black which  in those days, was always the case if they were black), strongly implies that they were in fact, white. This is not to excuse Cobb's transgressions, he had many; but it does bring up yet again Alexander's and Stump's credibility by asking the question, why would they claim Cobb's victims were black when there is no evidence of that?

An obvious answer is that by 1984 and beyond, race had become a contentious issue, far more than it was in 1961. By portraying Cobb as a racist, whether or not it was really true, the authors created sensational interest in their works where it wouldn't have existed before.

Charles Leerhsen was not the first person to discredit Al Stump. In an article first published in 2010 in The National Pastime, Wiliam R. Cobb, no relation to the ballplayer, writes a very detailed account about a shotgun that once belonged to Ty Cobb which ended up in the possession of a famous baseball memorabilia collection. The shotgun was claimed to be the weapon that killed Ty Cobb's father. It also had an interesting provenance as it once was in the possession of Al Stump.  In Stump's works on Cobb, he claims the ballplayer told him that his father's head was blown off by a shotgun. (Cobb's mother accidentally shot and killed her husband, mistaking him for an intruder). But William Cobb checked press accounts around time of the incident, police and court records from the trial of Amanda Cobb which all point to her having used a pistol to accidentally kill her husband, not a shotgun.

In none of the accounts of the death of Ty Cobb's father written before Stump's, was there any mention of a shotgun.

Why would Stump insist that Mr. Cobb was killed with a shotgun, and not just any shotgun but the one he happened to have in his possession? You don't think it could have been so he could sell the gun for a vastly inflated chunk of change do you? Well Stump did happen to put a good deal of Cobb's personal effects in his possession up for sale, many that supposedly had Cobb's signature, which later were proven to be forged. Eventually the auction houses refused to list any piece of Cobb memorabilia with the name of Al Stump listed on the provenance. Small wonder.

Incidentally, the shotgun in question was engraved with Ty Cobb's name and Stump claimed Cobb used it on numerous hunting trips. Not only would it be quite bizarre for Cobb to have his name engraved on the weapon that killed his father, not to mention use it to shoot ducks, but it seems unlikely that a murder weapon would have left been in the possession of the family of both the deceased and the perpetrator. Nonetheless, Stump went with the story probably assuming if his readers would buy all the other crap he wrote about Cobb, they'd buy this cockamamie story too.

Ken Burns obviously bought Stump's story, lock, stock and barrel. In his film he got off a final dig at the ballplayer, describing Ty Cobb's last days with words that came straight out of the pages of Stump's True Magazine article, including an interesting revelation that Cobb "deplored" the integration of baseball.

Maybe it's just me, but I'll take Ty Cobb's word on that matter over Al Stunp's any day.

Why wouldn't Ken Burns? As much as I enjoyed his baseball film, with its incessant sentimentality combining images of long lost players and fields of dreams, backed by a soundtrack of The Star Spangled Banner and Take Me Out to the Ballgame played on every conceivable instrument from a marching band to a flageolete, I couldn't help be struck by how much the story he told resembled a fairy tale. Just as every good Brothers Grimm story needs a witch who eats little children, Ken Burns's baseball tale needed a dark, despicable villain as the perfect foil to heroes such as Christy Mathewson and Jackie Robinson. The mythical Ty Cobb created by Al Stump perfectly fit the bill, while the complex, real people behind those myths would never cut the mustard. A reasonable Ty Cobb advocating near the end of his life for the inclusion of African Americans in baseball, would never do, any more than a Christy Mathewson taking time off from spring training to witness the public hanging of a black man in Alabama, or a Jackie Robinson taking time off from being a demigod to act like a prima donna.

In his book, Leerhsen recalls the famous movie line: "When legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Much has been written about Charles Leerhsen's book being "revisionist history", an attempt to rehabilitate the image of a man about whom much has been written. Bill James begins his piece on Ty Cobb this way:

If one were to take the time to document a thousand times in which Ty Cobb went out of his way to be kind to other people, including black people, would this change his image? I fear it would not.

He's probably right, so ingrained is our image of the man as a monster, we're afraid to let go, even when confronted with the truth. Leerhsen's theory is that we all need people like the mythical Ty Cobb because they make us feel better about our own inadequacies. We say to ourselves, I may be bad, but hey, at least I'm not a violent racist prick like Ty Cobb.

Leerhsen pulls no punches in describing Ty Cobb's many shortcomings. His book does not attempt to rehabilitate the man by giving us a new window into those shortcomings in order to understand them. Instead he addresses Cobb's real-life issues in detail while at the same time making a very good case that much of what we think we know about Ty Cobb is dead wrong, a contrived set of falsehoods set in motion by one unscrupulous man whose motivation was nothing more than his own fame and fortune. In that vein, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty does not attempt to revise history;  it tells the story of a real man while at the same time puts to rest an outrageous lie.


CODA

Now that's out of the way, what makes Charles Leerhsen's Cobb biography such a great read are the accounts of Ty Cobb the ballplayer. It's true that he did spike a number of infielders who made the foolish mistake of getting in his way on the base paths, but not with any greater frequency than other ballplayers of his era. While he spent much of his post-career, trying to clear his name as a dirty player, when he actually played, he didn't seem to mind his opponents thinking that he actually sharpened his spikes before each game (he really didn't). He readily admitted being a "mental hazard" to his opponents while running the bases, as the seed that he might do something crazy, planted in the minds of his opponents, was sometimes all it took. Part of his success stemmed from the fact that Ty Cobb was probably the most opportunistic ballplayer in the game's history.

Here's a quote from one of his teammates if not one of his biggest fans, Sam Crawford:

...Ty was dynamite on the base paths. He really was. Talk about strategy and playing with your head, that was Cobb all the way. It wasn't that he was so fast on his feet, although he was fast enough. There were others who were faster, though, like Clyde Milan, for instance. It was that Cobb was so fast in his thinking. He didn't outhit the opposition and he didn't outrun them. He outthought them!   

A lot of times Cobb would be on third base and I'd draw a base on balls, and as I started to go down to first I'd sort of half glance at Cobb, at third. He'd make a slight move that told me he wanted me to keep going -- not to stop at first, but to keep on going to second. Well, I'd trot two-thirds of the way to first and then suddenly, without warning, I'd speed up and go across first as fast as I could and tear out for second. He's on third, see. They're watching him, and suddenly there I go, and they don't know what the devil to do. 

If they try to stop me, Cobb'll take off for home. Sometimes they'd catch him, and sometimes they'd catch me, and sometimes they wouldn't get either of us. But most of the time they were too paralyzed to do anything, and I'd wind up at second on a base on balls ....

In his epilogue Charles Leershen recounts a story that pretty much sums up Ty Cobb. On a hot miserable day in Detroit with two out in the last of the ninth and the Tigers down by a bunch, Ty Cobb reached first on a single. Even the home town fans groaned. Wally Pipp the Yankee first baseman suggested to Cobb that he put an end to everyone's misery by letting himself get picked off. Cobb agreed, and took an "accommodating" lead off first. When the pitcher threw to Pipp, Cobb took off for second and got himself in a rundown. Needless to say, after a few bobbled balls, Cobb ended up on third. The next batter popped up to end the game. Now the ump at first heard the conversation between Cobb and Pipp and asked Cobb why he crossed up Pipp. Cobb, surprised as anyone in the ballpark said he didn't mean to do it, but as soon as he saw Pipp reaching to tag him out, "something exploded inside of me. I just couldn't stand there and take it without a fight."

I thought of that the other day while attending a major league game with my kids. The home team was down by a bunch with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The batter was a weak hitting infielder, batting from the left handed batters' box. The infield played this guy with a significant shift towards right field where this batter was most likely to hit the ball, a move usually reserved for power hitters. They would never have played Ty Cobb, another left handed hitter that way because he would have had a field day against such a shift. But today even weak hitters swing for home runs rather than trying to place a hit in the spot vacated by the infielders. Cobb would have been appalled. Sure enough, the batter struck out, but the catcher dropped the ball. While he fumbled around for what seemed an eternity looking for the ball, instead of taking off for first base as he was entitled, our batter just stood there looking perplexed as if to say, "what do I do now?" Finally the catcher found the ball and tagged the batter out as he never left the box, game over.

Ty Cobb's fight for every base style of baseball died out when Babe Ruth came along and popularized the home run. The so called "deadball era" style of baseball survived in the Negro Leagues where players routinely scored from second base on a bunt, ended up on second after a walk, and executed the most exciting play in all of baseball, the stealing of home, incidentally a record for which Ty Cobb holds to this day.

Once the Negro Leagues became absorbed into the major leagues, that style of play died out altogether in professional ball.

Ty Cobb became a dinosaur while he was still a player, as the fans and later the analysts deemed it should be so. They all seemed to believe that every player, even weak hitting middle infielders are better off swinging for a home run, even if it means a greater likelihood of striking out, rather than choking up on the bat and trying to place the ball, "hitting it where they ain't" for a base hit. (Cobb by the way was no weak hitter, he proved time and again that he could hit home runs when he wanted to. Even then he hardly ever struck out).

Sabrmetrically speaking, this all or nothing approach may be a more prudent strategy in the long run, but it sure is a heck of a lot less fun to watch.

Oh to have the chance to see Ty Cobb play again, if only once.

Fortunately, reading Charles Leerhsen's superb book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, is the next best thing.

Two inches?

We here in Chicago are feeling not a little smug these days as news reports coming from the great city of Atlanta tell us that city came to a standstill this week because of two inches of snow. In Chicago, an incapacitating snowfall is measured in feet not in inches so it does seem a little ridiculous to us that two measly inches would cause such a fuss.

Chicago this month has had its own problems with the severe winter, schools and places of business have closed due to unusually cold temperatures. Of course cold and snow of any kind is unusual in the Sun Belt; consequently cities like Atlanta are not equipped to deal with the white stuff. The entire city I'm told has all of three trucks equipped with snow plowing apparatus, and folks there have little experience driving on snow and ice, not to mention adequate clothing for sub-freezing temps. Consequently many Atlantans were stranded in their cars for up to 24 hours in the cold, trying to get home from work. Before we get too cheeky up here in Chi-town about our friends' plight in the Peach State, we have to remember it's all relative. I have no doubt that people in places like Minneapolis and Winnipeg are laughing at us right now for bitching and moaning about our chilly weather.

But two inches, really?

Sorry, I got a little carried away. A city after all can't be expected to come through unscathed whenever there's a once in fifty year weather event. I'm reminded of the 1979 blizzard in Chicago. Over a period of three days, about 200 feet of snow fell on this city. OK that's a bit of an exaggeration. Anyway the mayor at the time, Michael Bilandic was asked why the city was so slow in dealing with the snow problem. His answer, "what snow problem?", cost him his job. I can still see the famous campaign commercial of his soon-to-be successor, Jane Byrne. She wasted no time taking advantage of Bilandic's miscue by standing outside in the middle of the blizzard promising voters that if she were elected mayor, it would never snow again. She won the election and gosh darn it, we haven't had that much snow since. The other result of that blizzard is this: such is the fear of a repeat of the Bilandic fiasco, at the mere mention of the possibility of a trace of snow, the sitting mayor orders the entire fleet of plows and salt spreaders onto the streets. This city dumps so much salt on the streets in the winter that you can literally taste it in the air. It's not uncommon to see more salt on the streets than snow, although rumors of children in Chicago building saltmen are urban legend.

That's beginning to change. Due to budgetary constraints, we simply don't have as much money to spend on salt as we used to. It's mere speculation, but since our current mayor has aspirations other than being mayor for life, perhaps he's not quite so gung ho about dumping salt before the snow even starts to fall. A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday, we got about a foot of snow (no exaggeration) and at least in my neighborhood, there were no plows to be seen for most of the day. Still, people managed to get out, walking and driving about town without too much fuss. Of course most people in this town at least own a snow shovel.

My guess is that most people in Atlanta don't. Still, two inches?

I was transfixed on the TV while eating lunch today. The entire broadcast dealt with Atlanta's snow problem. There were helicopter shots of highways filled with stranded vehicles, people checking in to hotels after abandoning their vehicles, and live coverage of the Governor of Georgia apologizing to his constituents at a press conference for the chaos that ensued after their ahem, snowstorm. He's up for election later this year  and my guess is that the press conference was largely damage control. While politicians can't be blamed for bad weather, all indications point to the fact that the city of Atlanta and the State of Georgia screwed up:

• Turns out there was a severe ice storm a few years back in the area with much the same results. 
• This storm had been predicted for many days, heck I even knew it was coming thanks to a Facebook friend, so there was plenty of time to prepare. 
• When the storm began, the city advised businesses to send their employees home early without any thought of staggering release times, meaning that everyone was out on the roads at exactly the time the storm was at is worst.

But it's a double edged sword. Had government officials told people not to come in to work at all in anticipation of bad weather and the storm had proven not to be severe, you can bet there would have been hell to pay due to lost production and revenue from those businesses. It's a crap shoot and this time the local and state officials lost.

A few years ago, we had a bad storm that dumped between two and three feet (again, no exaggeration) on the city. Everybody knew it was coming for about a week, and almost everybody was prepared. Still, several motorists were stranded on Lake Shore Drive in snow drifts that literally covered cars up to their windshields and higher. Few however felt much sympathy for those people as they simply defied logic by driving that day.

That's not to say the folks in Atlanta should have been more prepared; the real culprit is the fact that Atlanta and so many other cities like it are designed around the automobile, allowing for little or no other transportation options. Here in Chicago when we were confronted with the very real threat of a major blizzard hitting later in the day, most everybody who elected not to stay home that day, chose not to drive to work. That meant even if they got stranded on say, a bus, they could get off and walk to a transportation alternative, or simply walk home. That is not an option in a city like Atlanta where most people live several miles from where they work and have no option other than driving.

The good news is that despite being terribly inconvenienced, people in Atlanta experienced something we experience up here in the Snow Belt more often: the misfortune of a community bringing people together. There were lots of stories of people helping out strangers by opening their doors to them, by bringing food, or simply commiserating with one another. Here is a link to a feature made by the Atlanta CBS affiliate featuring the husband of a friend of mine among others, helping out. I remember three years ago when we had our last big blizzard, people were nicer to each other. I have nothing but good memories of that experience and I imagine given some distance from the event, most Atlantans will feel the same. Nothing brings people together more than shared misery. As they say, if it doesn't kill you it only makes you stronger.

I close with some words of wisdom from Facebook. Yes between all the babble and photographs of cats you can find some real wisdom there. One friend posted that he found the terms describing our recent arctic blast, namely "Polar Vortex" and Chiberia" to be rather unsatisfactory. One of his friends replied: "I just call it January." The winner came from another friend who posted this:

If you're not homeless, please don't complain about the weather.

I rather liked that one. Try to stay warm everybody.

Oh Happy Day

Finally a little touch of spring is in the air after a winter that held its grip on the city longer than usual. I still have not seen my first crocus popping its head from the ground, usually one of the first signs of the season. I've seen robins, but they looked a little uncomfortable in the sub 40F temperatures.

For me it matters little what the calendar says, or what moment the vernal equinox takes place, or what the temperature may be. For me, today is the official first day of spring, It's Opening Day.

The wonderful thing about the game of baseball is that it transcends time and space. So much attention is given to the big leagues, especially on Opening Day, it's easy to forget that baseball is alive every time anyone anywhere picks up a bat and a ball. It comes alive in all the permutations of the game. Baseball is alive in the fields of the Dominican Republic where barefoot kids substitute sticks and rocks for bats and balls. It's alive in the streets of New York, where a broom handle makes a sufficient bat, and here in Chicago, where a game called pinners features a "batter" throwing a rubber ball against the front steps of his house while the fielding team comprised of one or two friends, tries to catch the ball on the fly for an out.

Baseball comes alive anytime you pour over the box scores of the previous day's games, or sift through the stats of your favorite players. Today as we begin a new season, baseball is all about the future; the question of the day is how will my team do, could this be the year? More poignantly, in a few weeks, the future will really come alive as the Little Leaguers take the field.

But perhaps more than any other game, baseball is about the past. If baseball has ever meant anything  in your life, pick up a brand new baseball glove and take a good whiff. See if the smell of the new leather doesn't bring you back some cherished moment of your life. The very nature of the game allows itself to be de-constructed down to every pitch, only to be re-constructed at a later time. Reading a good account of a game from the past can make it come alive as if you were there. A simple word or phrase for any baseball fan, can evoke a play which defined a game, which defined an entire season or team. The mere mention of "Merkle's Boner", or "Homer in the Glaomin'", or simply "the Catch", brings to mind famous or infamous moments (depending on your point of view), of a game that took place long before we, or our parents, or even our grandparents were born. Yet those fleeting moments of so long ago still matter, and they can be still discussed and debated long after the cows have come home.

Likewise, the players of the past matter even today; memories of their glory days can be conjured up simply by their colorful nicknames...

• The Flying Dutchman (Honus Wagner)
• The Georgia Peach (Ty Cobb)
• The Big Train (Walter Johnson)
• Shoeless Joe (Joe Jackson)
• The Sultan of Swat (Babe Ruth)
• The Yankee Clipper (Joe DiMaggio)
• The Splendid Splinter (Ted Williams)
• Hammerin' Hank (Hank Aaron)
• Charlie Hustle (Pete Rose)
• The Wizard of Oz (Ozzie Smith)
• Mr. October (Reggie Jackson)
• The Big Hurt (Frank Thomas)

or by their notable comments:

• Hit 'em where they ain't (Wee Willie Keeler)
• Say Hey (Willie Mays)
• It ain't over 'till it's over (Yogi Berra)
• Let's play two (Ernie Banks)

All those great Major League players of the past with two notable exceptions, are or will soon be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., the sanctum sanctorum of the game. Great players to be sure, but not all were necessarily exemplary human beings. To put it charitably, let's just say the Hall of Fame is made up of a colorful mix of characters. Bill Veeck once said this about the members of the Hall:

Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils .... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.

Just as the game exists on many levels and in many places, not just on the hallowed playing fields of the Major Leagues, ballplayers come in all shapes and sizes, genders, and physical ability, or lack thereof. From four year old tee-ballers to ninety plus year olds playing in wheelchairs, everybody who gets into a batters box or steps onto a pitchers mound somewhere, can claim for him or herself the esteemed title of ballplayer.

It's a fact that some of the greatest ballplayers of all time did not have one single appearance in a Major League game.

In my mind perhaps the greatest man (if not the greatest ballplayer), to ever play the game at its highest level was Buck O'Neil. His ten seasons in professional baseball as a player were, like many of his contemporaries, interrupted by his military service in World War II.  Buck was a decent hitter, lifetime .288 average, (three seasons over .300), and was also an excellent first baseman. After his playing days he became a manager, then a major league coach and scout. Buck O'Neil's stats didn't keep him out of the big leagues as a player. What kept him out was in his words: "my beautiful suntan." O'Neil you see played back in the days when people of his race were not permitted to play in the Major Leagues.

After he retired from baseball, Buck O'Neil became a tireless spokesman and living symbol of the Negro Leagues, the separate and equal (in terms of talent only, not equal in anything else) cousin of the majors. He traveled over the country dispelling myths that the Negro Leagues were made up of poor, illiterate, rabble-rousing misfits and clowns who barnstormed around the country in beat up old jalopies and busses.

Here he is in 2006 addressing the induction ceremony of seventeen Negro League players into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown:



There are a couple of truly remarkable things about that speech. First of all, he was 94 years old at the time and had only a few months to live. Yet he spent the last days of his life doing exactly what he did for years, proclaiming his message of the pure joy of the game, and of love and forgiveness, to anyone willing to listen.

But by far the most remarkable thing about his speech is that when the baseball writers convened to select players for induction into the Hall of Fame that year, Buck O'Neil himself was up for consideration. He was rejected. His numbers as a player they said, just didn't add up. Despite his bitter disappoint after the snub, he wholeheartedly agreed to address the crowd to honor his fellow members of the Negro Leagues, his message being more important to him than self-aggrandizement.

The Hall of Fame did honor Mr. O'Neil with a life-size statue and by naming a lifetime achievement award after him in 2008, two years after his death.

But he still has yet to be inducted as a member.

Somehow I don't think Buck O'Neil would want us to feel bad about that. I can imagine him saying two things:

First he'd say that life is simply too short to harbor bitterness.

And the second thing he'd say, especially today is this:

Let's go out and play some ball!