Wally Funk

Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, but he did one incredibly cool thing regarding his trip into space last week aboard his own rocket ship, he invited Wally Funk to join him,

Wally Funk

In case your feelings about the current  billionaires' race to space range from blase to shitting bricks pissed off and you haven't been paying attention, Wally Funk is a pilot who in the early sixties was chosen to be part of a group of women who were tested to see how they would fare during space flight. The tests ran concurrently with the Mercury Program, the United States' first foray into manned space exploration. 

I guess it's appropriate to use the term "manned" here because in the end, the program that Ms. Funk took part in was ignobly scrubbed and the United States wouldn't send a woman into space until 1983 when Sally Ride climbed aboard the space shuttle Challenger for her first of two missions, both aboard that ill fated spacecraft. Ride joined NASA after seeing an ad in her college newspaper soliciting women to become applicants for astronaut training.

Much like everything during the early days of the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, the USSR was way out in the lead as their first female Cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova ventured into space inside her Vostok 6 capsule in June of 1963. Having orbited the earth 48 times in just shy of three days, Tereshkova logged more hours in space than all seven of the American Mercury astronauts combined. She remains the only woman to have flown a solo mission. 

The group of women which included Ms. Funk, took part in a privately funded  initiative called "The Women in Space Program" which was conceived in order to test whether women would make good candidates for space travel. It all began when the program's founder, Dr. William Lovelace who designed many of the tests that NASA used on their candidates for the Mercury Program, invited the highly decorated pilot Jerrie Cobb to take those same tests, all of which she passed. Lovelace's friend, Jacqueline Cochran, another noted pilot and businesswoman, agreed to finance a project that would test more. In all about 25 women, all elite pilots in their own right, were recruited for the project. Thirteen of the women passed the same insanely rigorous tests as the seven men who were chosen for the Mercury Project.

That is until Phase III of the tests which would have been held at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine. After Jerry Cobb took and passed all those as well, the Navy cancelled the tests as NASA, who was not  involved in the project, refused to sign off on it. 

There were a plethora of reasons why NASA might have been reticent to include women astronauts. Some were legitimate concerns (all subsequently put to rest) about how the female anatomy would handle space travel. Along those lines, probably the number one concern was menstruation in a weightless environment. I know that sounds ludicrous, simply a pretext to exclude women, but in space, an environment where even farting is cause for concern, no stone can remain unturned. Another cause for concern was how space would affect a woman's fertility. Apparently it doesn't. Then there were the  typically male concerns such as whether a woman's natural temperament, especially during her period, might prove problematic during a space flight.

On the other hand, the chief motivator for the study of the Women in Space Program, was the idea that there might be several advantages of having women astronauts over men. For example on average, women are smaller then men, they eat less, and consume less oxygen. As prosaic as that sounds, all that adds up to a significant reduction in cargo weight, meaning less fuel required per astronaut, a precious commodity in space travel. Women were also found to do better than men in isolation tests suggesting that they would fare better on very long missions such as a trip to Mars.

But all that would be way in the future and NASA had in the early sixties one and only goal, to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade as President Kennedy proposed during his speech before Congress on May 25, 1961, and no obstacle was going to get in its way.

Perhaps the biggest red flag of all for the ever PR conscious space agency was public opinion. I don't have the stats to back this up, but my guess is that despite the tens of thousands of young American women or maybe more at the time, tingling to get a chance at becoming an astronaut, the very real prospect of sending a woman to her death on a space mission, even if she willingly accepted the risk, would have been unacceptable for the majority of Americans at the time, and almost certainly would have killed the program. 

Pretexts aside, all that was moot. NASA's ace in the hole for not allowing women in space was the requirement imposed on them by President Eisenhower, that candidates for the astronaut corps all be selected from the ranks of elite military test pilots. By elite I mean jet pilots and guess what? The military did not allow women to fly jets in those days. 

Now it must be pointed out that in reality, at least during the Mercury program, there was little flying involved on the part of the astronauts as the flights were controlled remotely from the ground. The original astronauts in fact had to lobby for systems inside their capsules that would enable them to control the spacecraft, if ever so slightly. As I pointed out in my last post, the very first Mercury astronauts were chimpanzees, both of whom I'm guessing never flew planes, let alone jets. Truth be told, the original astronauts didn't need to be pilots at all, (Valentina Tereshkova wasn't) let alone jet pilots. Like practically everything involved with the space program in those days, the jet pilot requirement was pure PR. 

But rules are rules.

However there was another requirement that was waived for one of the male astronauts, a college degree, something John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, did not possess at the time.

Cobb and her fellow astronaut hopeful Janey Hart hoping to take advantage of that Glenn exception, appealed to President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson (who oversaw NASA) and the issue was brought before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics who examined the possibility that gender discrimination may have played a role in the matter, (ya think?). 

Among those testifying before the committee against having women astronauts was none other than John Glenn himself.

 At those hearings, Glenn said:

The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.

As unenlightened as those words sound today, Glenn, definitely a man of his time, wasn't too far off base, at least in describing the social norms if not necessarily the reality of 1962 America. If you're not old enough to remember, take a look at the way popular culture prescribed gender based roles for men and women. It was a world filled with women who served predominantly as homemakers married to professional men. They had names like June Cleaver, Laura Petry, and just plain Jeannie whose fictional partner whom she called Master, was an astronaut. 

Perhaps the baddest pilot of all,
Jerrie Cobb, who when all was said and done,
in William Lovelace's rigorous astronaut tests
finished in the top 2 percentile of all
potential astronauts, male and female. 

What you never saw on TV or in the movies movies in the late fifties and early to mid sixties were bad ass female pilots with names like Myrtle Cagle or Wally Funk, or physicists turned astronauts named Sally Ride. That name did however serve as the refrain to a very cool soul tune from the era made famous by Wilson Pickett called "Mustang Sally."

But it wasn't just pop culture where women's options were limited. Check out this video of clips of John F. Kennedy press conferences and see how he dismissive he was of the woman reporter who sincerely questioned him about promoting equal rights for women in this country.

That reporter, Mae Craig, a highly respected veteran journalist who marched with Suffragists in the twenties, implied in her question that despite working hard to promote the rights "of others", the Kennedy administration was doing little to advance the rights of women. As you can see from Kennedy's response, the issue of equal rights for women was simply not taken very seriously by him, or for that matter mainstream America in the early sixties.  

Mae Craig's question to the president turned out to be prophetic insofar as women astronauts were concerned. While Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin and should have opened the doors for women astronauts, it didn't. It would take another eight years when an amendment was added to the title which granted women the right to legal representation in their quest to become astronauts. Consequently in 1978, NASA dropped its requirement that astronauts be jet pilots and started recruiting female candidates for the corps, precisely the time Sally Ride found the brochure that would change her life.  

Since Sally Ride's first mission in 1983, as of a week ago, 51 American women astronauts have flown into space.

Last Tuesday, Wally Funk raised that number to 52. Coincidentally that day was the 52nd anniversary of the first "manned" lunar landing, 

At age 21, Funk was the youngest member of the Women in Space program and one of the 13 who passed all of the astronaut tests given to them. She also passed equivalents of the Phase III tests, having taken them privately, outside of the naval facilities.

Her background was similar to that of her fellow Women in Space members in that she fell in love with planes and aviation at a very early age, in her case at about the same time that she learned to walk. She had her first flight lesson at nine, and received her pilot's license, AND became a professional pilot at 19. 

Wally Funk was thwarted from pursuing her dreams to their fullest her entire life because of her gender. Perhaps it started in high school when she wanted to take electives in shop and technical drawing but was told she could only take home economics classes. So she did what any sensible person would do, she left high school early and enrolled in a college where she would thrive. I guess you could do that in those days. 

Later when she applied for a job as a commercial airline pilot, a position she was more than qualified for, she was rejected on the pretext that there were no rest rooms for women in their training facilities.  

And on and on. Yet despite that, up to this point by all accounts she has led a very rewarding life in the field of aviation including high level positions in both the FAA and the FTSB. 

I say up to this point because clearly she's not finished. As she emerged from the capsule after her brief encounter with space last week, she was clearly exhilerated but bemoaned the fact that the experience was way too short and couldn't wait to do it again. Long before Bezos asked her to accompany him aboard the maiden passenger flight of his spacecraft, Ms. Funk put down a deposit to fly aboard Richard Branson's spacecraft when it goes into service shuttling passengers for brief trips outside the earth's atmosphere. That spacecraft unlike Bezos's, is a space plane, controlled by two pilots who like the old Space Shuttles, guide their craft to a landing on a runway rather than a capsule parachuting to the ground.

As part of the competition between the two billionaires, perhaps Branson will top Bezos by asking Funk to take over the controls in one of his space planes. 

Now THAT would be sweet justice.

In that vein, John Glenn finally got the comeuppance he deserved for the words he spoke at that hearing so many years ago. For twenty three years he held the record as the oldest person, at 77, to have been in space. Wally Funk at 82 beat Glenn's record last Tuesday. Given the current push to send paying customers into space, I'm sure that record will not hold for long. I also wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Ms. Funk breaks her own record. 

Wally Funk's list of accomplishments in aviation as well as other fields is too numerous to list here but in case you're interested, as you should be, you can read all about them here.

Today she is only one of two surviving members of that elite group of pilots who participated in the Women in Space program who long after the fact, received the moniker "The Mercury 13". 

Ironically, most of the members of The Mercury 13 never met one another during the project as their tests were held separately. Many of them finally got together on the occasion of the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-63, the first shuttle mission to be piloted by a woman, Eileen Collins. Here is a photo of them taken at Cape Canaveral in front of the launch pad in 1995:

Seven members of the Mercury 13 from left to right:
Gene Nora Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Ratley,
Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman.

The total number of women of all nationalities who have logged hours in space is 65.* Needless to say all of them owe their careers to these pioneers of space and the rest of their remarkable bad ass comrades. 

Here in alphabetical order, is the list of the Mercury 13:

Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, her twin sister Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane Briggs Hart, Jean Hixson, Irene Leverton, Jerri Truhill Sloan, Bernice Stedman, Gene Nora Stumbough,  and Rhea Woltmann.

In reflecting on the women who could have been astronauts, Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter had this to say:

"NASA never had any intention of putting those women in space. The whole idea was foisted upon it, and it was happy to have the research data, but those women were before their time."

That's for sure.

* Sadly, Christa McAuliffe, NASA's first civilian on a space mission is not counted among the 65 because her one mission which ended tragically aboard the Shuttle Challenger, never technically made it into space.

Including McAuliffe, a total of four women have lost their lives during space missions. The other three are Judith Resnik, McAuliffe's crewmate aboard Challenger, and Kalpana Chawla, and Laurel Clark, both of whom perished as a result of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. 

Tragic as the loss of their lives was, the lessons learned from the mistakes that led to the catastrophic accidents that caused their deaths have helped make space travel a little less risky for their successors. 

I have no doubt that to a woman, each of them would look at their ultimate sacrifice that way.

They and their crewmates who perished aboard Challenger in 1986, and Columbia in 2003, fourteen in all, will never be forgotten. 

Artemis II

I woke up one day this month at 4AM. Outside our window was a nearly full moon which illuminated the room. None of that is unusual except this time, four brave astronauts, the first to leave Earth's orbit in 54 years, were about to pay a visit to our nearest celestial neighbor. Obviously, I couldn't see them, but I knew I was looking straight at them.

And the thought thrilled me beyond words.

I'm not proud to admit this, but I didn't start paying attention to the Artemis II mission until a day or two before they lifted off from Cape Canaveral on April Fool's Day. How different it was back in the sixties and seventies when not a manned space flight went by without my undivided attention. Perhaps it was my young, impressionable age, or the thought that I was witnessing something that no one had ever done before which was the case with every space flight in that era, that made it all so compelling. 

I guess since we've been there and done all that, this time around was not quite the same.

And yet, maybe it was even better this time.

Artemis II crew clockwise from upper left:
Astronauts Koch, Glover, Weisman and Hansen.

Despite and perhaps because of all the mishegoss going on in our world today, this mission was bloody fantastic. 

The moment I laid eyes on the Moon early that morning, I've had several  questions about the mission and manned space flight in general, some of which have been satisfactorily answered online, others not. 

The first thing that occurred to me as I saw the nearly full Moon was this: if the Moon is full from our perspective, the side of the Moon that is perpetually opposite of us, sometimes mistakenly referred to as the "dark side", would have indeed been in darkness. As the astronauts would be flying around the Moon, why did they plan the mission to take place at a time when the part of the Moon not visible from Earth would be in total darkness?

The answer I got was painfully straightforward: observing the side of the Moon that never faces us was simply not an important part of the mission. We've been sending both manned and unmanned spacecraft there for nearly sixty years now, so its entire surface has been documented, although the Artemis crew did focus on specific areas NASA is interested in for future landing sites. But since the timing of the mission depended upon several factors regarding the relative positions of the Earth and the Moon, the illumination of the opposite side of the lunar surface during the mission was a non-factor.

The next question came up after learning that the Artemis II astronauts at one point in their mission, would break the record for the greatest distance human beings have been from the Earth. Wait a minute I thought, we've already been to the Moon, how is that possible? The answer came as I was watching the mission and learned the astronauts would break the record that was set in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13. If you recall, that was the ill-fated mission aborted after an explosion in an oxygen tank knocked out the power in the main portion of the spacecraft, the Command Module. 

I remember it well. There obviously was no good time for the tank to explode but if it had to happen, it could not have come at a more opportune time. The spacecraft was on its way to the Moon meaning the Lunar Excursion Module, (the L.E.M. for short), a separate vehicle, was still attached to the disabled Command Module. Fortunately, the astronauts could use the engines aboard the L.E.M. to make the maneuvers necessary to safely return them to Earth. Had the explosion happened as the crew were heading back to Earth after the L.E.M. had been jettisoned, or during the time two of the three astronauts were on the moon separated from the Command Module, all three would have been stranded in space with no chance of survival. 

Nevertheless, it was a harrowing experience as you know if you remember it, read about it, or have seen the movie Apollo 13, which from what I understand, was a reasonably accurate depiction of the event.

Anyway, with the main ship disabled, the crew couldn't just throw on the brakes, make a sudden U Turn and head for home. Rather, with the limited amount of power available to them, they were able to take advantage of the Moon's gravity to help send them back to terra firma. They did that by adjusting their trajectory to send them into a higher lunar orbit than the original plan. That meant instead of the ship being in a position to continuously orbit the Moon, in the higher trajectory the moon's gravity would have caught hold of the spacecraft changing its course but would not have been strong enough to hold on to it, thereby sending the ship back into space toward Earth.  *

That higher orbit explains why Apollo 13 held the distance record for manned space flight until this mission, a record the crew, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise certainly never intended nor hoped to break. 

But it was the intention of the Artemis II mission all along to make just one pass around the moon, using roughly the same trajectory forced upon Apollo 13, albeit just a little higher, accounting for the new record. Bragging rights aside, of all the magnificent accomplishments of the Artemis II mission, breaking the distance record had to be the least significant. **

We lost Jim Lovell last year but shortly before his death, the only astronaut to have been to the Moon twice without setting foot on it, recorded a heartfelt message to this crew, mentioning them all by name, and welcoming the four of them to "his old neighborhood." It was perhaps the second most poignant moment of the mission. *** You can hear the message here. 

Then of course I wondered, why only one pass around the moon instead of making several orbits as the crew of the first lunar voyage Apollo 8 (Jim Lovell's other trip to the Moon) did in 1968? It reminded me of my father who whenever we traveled anywhere, was content to get out of the car at our destination, have a look around for maybe a moment or two, then get back into the car and drive home. For him, just having been there seemed to be all that mattered. 

It turns out: the main focus of the Artemis II mission was to test the capabilities of the spacecraft, especially its life support systems in outer space, no small matter, so exploration was not the highest priority on the agenda. **** My father would have understood. 

Back to thinking about the recent passing of Jim Lovell who was without question my biggest astronaut hero as a child, I wondered how many of the Apollo astronauts are still around. I could only think of one, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin (Apollo 11), the second person to walk on the Moon. 

Here's the answer: Of the men who got to walk on the moon, in addition to Aldrin, David Scott (Apollo 15), Charles Duke (Apollo 16), and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) are still alive at this writing. Mentioned above, Fred Haise was denied the opportunity because of the aborted Apollo 13 mission but got a good view of the Moon. Unfortunately, he was probably too busy wondering if he'd make it home alive to appreciate it. He is still with us, as is Russell Schweickart who was aboard Apollo 9, which featured the first test flight of the L.E.M., but did not leave Earth's orbit.

Which got me thinking about how long it's been since we've been to the Moon. Surely it occurred to me, none of the crew of Artemis II were born yet when Harrison Schmidt and Chicago's own Eugene Cernan were the last people to date to have walked on the moon. Making myself feel really old, I was right.

Here is the crew of Artemis II who have returned to the good earth from their magnificent journey, listed in order from youngest to oldest:

Mission Specialist Christina Koch - 46.

Pilot Victor Glover - 49.

Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen - 50.

Commander Reid Wiseman - 50. 

All spring chickens. But not really, the average age of the Apollo astronauts when they went into space was slightly less than 40. I guess 50 is really the new 40.

Another difference is the racial and gender makeup of the space crews of yesterday and today. The Apollo astronauts sent into space, as well as those of the Gemini and Mercury programs before it, and those to follow for another decade, were all white men. That would not change until 1983. On June 18 of that year, Sally Ride became the first American woman astronaut to go into space. On August 30th of that year, Guy Bluford became the first black American astronaut to go into space. Since that time U.S. space crews have typically been a mixture of genders, races, and nationalities that reflect kind of sort of, the population of this country.

Perhaps the two most notable space missions of the Space Shuttle program were sadly the ones that ended in tragedy, Challenger in January of 1986, and Columbia in February of 2003. Aboard both those two doomed missions were women and people of color who gave their lives for this country, for science, for education and for the passion of exploration. 

One would think in this day and age, hardly anyone would bat an eye, as I didn't, that this mission included one woman and one black man. 

Here I couldn't have been more wrong, people did notice. The issue of D.E.I. in space (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) indeed came up as the current administration has mandated that all U.S. government agencies abandon efforts of hiring based upon gender and race. This means that NASA is now prohibited from even discussing the race or gender of upcoming or future crews that have not yet been assigned. 

It would not surprise me that since the Space Shuttle Program, race and gender have been issues considered in the selection process for space missions for many reasons, not the least of which has been PR. But here's the thing, PR has always been a significant part of NASA's mission, ever since its inception in the 1950s. 

Perhaps if the original scientists of NASA had their way, there would be no astronauts at all as most space exploration, as we've seen over the past seven decades, can be carried out quite nicely by machines that don't place such great demands both physical and emotional on the program that human beings do. Plus, you don't have to worry about returning them to earth.

But nothing captures the public's attention like sending people into space, and to cover the enormous cost of space exploration, NASA needed to get the American public behind it.

It was President Eisenhower who decided that the people who represented this country by risking their lives going into space would be military test pilots. Today that seems like a no-brainer but early on, NASA administrators had all sorts of ideas of what kind of people would make ideal astronauts. The most important qualification in their minds was not being averse to risk. To that end, race car drivers and circus performers were early candidates to be our first astronauts. 

As the early manned space missions were controlled from the ground, the first occupants of spacecraft were essentially just along for the ride, hence there was no requirement of flying skill. I wonder how many people today realize that our country's first astronaut (so to speak) sent into space was not Alan Shepard, but Ham, a four-year-old chimpanzee in January of 1961. Incidentally, Ham didn't get his name until after his groundbreaking flight as the first American great ape in space. That was because NASA officials were worried that if the chimp had a name rather than just a number (No.65), the PR would be much worse if he were killed during the flight.

Naturally, sending highly conditioned and trained military pilots with massive egos to do the work of a chimp, did not sit well with the men who would be our first human beings in space. The seven Mercury astronauts, Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper, insisted in no uncertain terms that they would have at least some amount of control of their spacecraft (a term insisted upon by the astronauts over the word "capsule" coined by the scientists) as well as a window, not in the original design. Knowing full well their PR importance to the success of the entire space program, the astronauts threatened to go public with their concerns and the NASA administrators ultimately acquiesced. 

It may surprise you that women were indeed considered to be among our first astronauts. Here's a piece I wrote in 2021 about "The Women in Space Program", inspired by Wally Funk, the pilot who had it been another era, may have gotten her chance to have been among the Mercury Seven. 

Spoiler alert, she didn't get that chance because of PR.

Since we live in a much different era. today it should be a no brainer that we have crews that represent our diverse nation. I would challenge anyone to look at the resumes of Koch, Glover, Hansen and Weisman, and not be completely blown away by their pre-mission accomplishments. And I would challenge anyone to assess the three Americans' performances during this mission and not be exceptionally proud to have each of them representing the best of our country. The Canadian people are equally proud no doubt to be represented by London, Ontario's own Jeremy Hansen.

If the anti-DEI crowd is truly sincere that only the most qualified people should be selected for space missions, it will be interesting to see their reaction when a future crew of a high-profile mission consists entirely of women and people of color. 

Finally, beyond PR, why do we send people into space?

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of reasons, but here I'm going to give one example that is both mundane and mind blowing at the same time.

It is a photograph. 

Earthrise from the moon. NASA photograph by Bill Anders,  December 24, 1968

Planet Earth had already been seen and usually photographed from space on every manned mission flown by U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. So when the Apollo 8 astronauts set off on their mission to be the first humans to orbit the Moon, all their attention was focused on our natural satellite or as I prefer to think of it, our companion planet.***** While Moon bound, the astronauts didn't look back, there was no camera mounted behind their spacecraft and naturally, no rear-view mirror. 

Of course they were blown away being the first humans to set eyes upon the side of the Moon we never get to see from Earth, and set about to photograph it in great detail. But they weren't prepared for what they were about to experience. As they flew sixty miles above the lunar surface, Astronaut Bill Anders described the color of the lunar surface as resembling "dirty beach sand." Mile upon mile upon mile of unrelenting dirty beach sand. Then it appeared on the horizon.  

The one spot of brilliant, glorious color in the midst of seemingly endless dirty beach sand and the vast, complete blackness of space.

It was Earth, our home as no one had ever seen it, the entire planet seen from outer space. 

The mission was planned down to the minutest detail but one thing they did not expect was the astronauts' reaction upon seeing Earth from outer space for the first time. This wonderful piece from 2018 includes a recording of the three Apollo 8 astronauts as they first caught sight of our planet. In the recording you can hear three straight shooting 1960s military men, acting like little school kids on Christmas, which indeed it was. 

The crew was equipped with cameras which were intended to photograph the lunar surface. Being film cameras. the number of pictures they could take was limited to the amount of film they had on board. So, when Earth first appeared to them unexpectedly above the lunar horizon, Bill Anders knew he had to fumble around to find the camera loaded with color film while the fleeting moment still presented itself. 

I think we can all relate. 

Then on the recording you can hear Commander Frank Borman, the straightest shooter of them all tell Anders not to take that picture: "it's not on the schedule" he says. From his tone I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure he was joking.

That photograph would prove to be perhaps the most important photograph ever made. Allow me to quote myself:

For the first time we saw our planet exactly as that, a small, fragile, finite world floating in a see of nothingness. We haven’t seen our planet the same since. We once thought of the earth as a bountiful place with infinite resources. Today at least the reasonable among us, see this beautiful planet as our home. I don't think that it was coincidence that the environmental movement gained tremendous steam after we saw those photographs. The last man to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan said: "We went to explore the Moon, and in fact discovered the Earth".

Had the crew of Apollo 8 been robots instead of human beings, that "unscheduled" photograph would probably never have been made, and no one would have been there to testify to one of the most humbling experiences imaginable. 

And wouldn't you know it, it would be Frank Borman of all people, the man of few words and fewer platitudes who was once described by a psychologist as the "most uncomplicated man he ever met",  who stated the experience of seeing the Earth from the Moon in the most profound and dare I say, poetic of terms: 

It's 240,000 miles away. It was small enough you could cover it with your thumbnail. The dearest things in life were back on the Earth-- my family, my wife, my parents. They were still alive then. That was, for me, the high point of the flight from an emotional standpoint.

And now we're back to the Moon and we have a new set of pictures. As someone who knows a thing or two about photography, I'll use a term that I hope isn't too technical here.

Those pictures are fucking unbelievable.

Honestly, I could write a book about the hundreds of photographs I've seen so far made by the Artemis II astronauts but fortunately there's a video that does a better job than I could.

Here it is. Watch it, it's well worth the 30 or so minute run time.

And now we have a new generation of explorers, one that isn't afraid to let down their guard and show their emotions. A good place to witness that is this link to the crew's appearance in Houston on Saturday, April 11, 2026.

I've gone on way too long here but I'd like to close with something Christina Koch said during that appearance the day after they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean last Friday:

Several years ago I was giving a speech and I was doing my usual talk about crew and crewmates and teamwork and someone asked the question: "What makes a crew? What is different about a crew from a team?"

 And I was like, I got this, I open my mouth confidently to tell then everything I knew about being a crewmate, and everything that came out of my mouth was completely without value....

But the last ten days I've gotten a little bit of a better answer on that question.

A crew is a group that is in it all the time no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, but gives grace that holds accountable.

A crew has the same cares and the same needs, and a crew is inescapably, (here she turns around to look at her three crewmates on the stage), beautifully, dutifully linked.

So, when we saw tiny earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn't necessarily just earth. It was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging, undisturbingly in the universe.

(At this point she pauses briefly to gather her thoughts after being overcome with emotion.)

So, I may have not learned -- I know I haven't learned -- everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there's one new thing I know, and that is Planet Earth, you are a crew. Thank you.

So, to answer the question posed above, machines are perfect tools for gathering data to better learn about our universe. We send people into space to bring back art and poetry, to better learn about ourselves.

NOTES:

* I made it sound simple, but that correction in trajectory required a precise series of engine burns to get the spacecraft into the correct position to first enter the Moon's orbit, then be "slingshot" back to Earth. It took ten minutes for an IBM 360 mainframe computer the size of a room and then some, to come up with the set of instructions for the correct sequence of engine burns which had to be fed one burn at a time in order for the astronauts to manually execute them correctly. Of course, I had to see how that would compare to a modern computer. Care to guess how long it would take my cellphone to make the same calculations? A small fraction of a second. We may not have been to the Moon in 54 years, but we've done a few other things in that time.

** I was watching live coverage of the mission on NASA's YouTube channel at the time the Artemis was supposed to break Apollo 13's distance record. The time until breaking the record was displayed on the upper left corner of the screen and I wondered what would happen once that clock counted down to zero. The answer is nothing, not one of the crew nor anyone at Mission Control in Houston seemed to mention it. What did happen was this...

***Unquestionably the most poignant moment of the mission was when Jeremy Hansen announced that three members of the crew decided to name a previously unnamed lunar crater Carroll, in honor of the late wife of the fourth astronaut, their commander Reid Weisman.  

**** Nonetheless, there was still a good amount of exploration putting the astronauts' valuable time in space to good use.

***** Of the nine known planets in our solar system (yes, I'm counting Pluto), six of them have moons, or celestial bodies that revolve about them. All of the moons, except ours, are significantly smaller than the planet they orbit.  Our moon is about one quarter the size of Earth meaning that if you were to view the Earth and our moon together, say from Mars, the two are close enough in size to appear as a double planet. 

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.