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Fake News Made Baseball Icon Ty Cobb a Dirt Bag — But He Wasn't

April 04, 2017
 Staff

WRITER

Ty Cobb, baseball's first superstar, is remembered for being the worst racist and dirtiest player ever to take the field. But was he? A new PragerU video by Cobb biographer Charles Leerhsen provides compelling evidence to the contrary:

How could a man born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? Well, as it turns out, Ty Cobb descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for his troubles. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate Army because of the slavery issue. And his father, an educator, once broke up a lynch mob.

In researching Cobb's legacy, Leerhshen found that nearly every accusation against the baseball legend found its roots in the same source: Articles and books that were not fact-checked and published after Cobb's death by a bitter, opportunistic journalist named Al Stump, whom Cobb had once threatened to sue for making up stories about him.

RELATED: Calling Good People ‘Racist’ Isn’t New: The Case of Ty Cobb

"I would like to hear who has been besmirched that needs to be restored? Whose credibility has been destroyed that needs to have it restored?" Glenn asked.

Glenn challenged listeners to email patgray@glennbeck.com with the names of historical figures --- from the 20th century or before --- whose legacy has been inaccurately portrayed.

Listen to this segment from The Glenn Beck Program:

Well, the latest thing is we just found this Ty Cobb Prager U discussion about Ty Cobb not being who you think he is.

STU: Now, because I'm a big baseball fan.

PAT: Yeah, me too.

STU: We're all sports fans.

PAT: And what have you heard about Ty Cobb? Do you know about Ty Cobb at all?

GLENN: No. I just know he's a bad guy. That's all I know.

JEFFY: Right!

PAT: Bad guy. That's all anybody knows about him. Great baseball player. Racist.

STU: Racist. Dirty player.

PAT: Killed a guy. Never paid for it. Spiked people when he slid into second base as often as he could, you know, that kind of thing. Well, listen to this.

VOICE: He was Major League Baseball's first superstar. The first man ever inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame, and he still has the game's highest career batting average, 366, almost 90 years after he retired.

PAT: Wow.

GLENN: His name is Ty Cobb.

Yet, despite his historic achievements, he is often remembered for being the worst racist and the dirtiest player ever to take the field. If you know baseball, you've heard the stories. Ty Cobb would pistol whip black men he passed on the street. He once stabbed to death a black waiter in Cleveland, just because the young man was acting uppity. On the field, he was set to sharpen the spikes to cut up rival infielders. He supposedly had no friends.

In the movie, Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson said that Cobb wasn't invited to the ghost league cornfield reunion (phonetic) because, quote, no one liked the son of a bitch.

A lifelong baseball fan, I believed these stories when I set out to write the first authoritative biography of Cobb in 20 years. I had been hearing them all my life. And like a lot of people, I took the repetition as evidence.

But to my astonishment, as I delved into the source material, newspapers, census reports, and personal letters, I couldn't find any proof that they were true.

On the contrary, Cobb's teammates on the whole seemed to respect him, defending him on the field and off. His opponents said he played the game hard, but clean. Wally Schang, a veteran catcher, was typical, he once said Cobb never cut me up. He was too pretty a slider to hurt anyone who put the ball on him right.

One famous photograph of 1912 shows Cobb flying foot first into the crotch of St. Louis Brown's catcher Paul Krichell. It looks bad. But pictures can be deceiving. In reality, Cobb is kicking the ball out of Krichell's glove. He didn't spike the catcher. Krichell later said, in a way, it was really my fault. I was standing in front of the plate, instead of on the side where I could tag tie as he slid in.

Indeed, in 1910, Cobb actually asked the League to require that players dulled their spikes.

And what about the bigotry? How could a man born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? Well, as it turns out, Ty Cobb descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for his troubles. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate Army because of the slavery issue. And his father, an educator, once broke up a lynch mob.

On the subjects of blacks playing with whites, Cobb said, "The Negro should be accepted whole-heartedly and not grudgingly. The Negro has the right to play professional baseball. And who is to say he has not?"

PAT: It doesn't sound like a racist.

VOICE: Cobb attended many Negro League games, sometimes throwing out the first pitch. And sitting in the dugout with the players, he said Willie Mayes was the only modern day player he'd pay to see.

As for that black waiter he supposedly killed, well, in reality, he was a hotel night watchman. And Cobb didn't kill him. He just scuffled with him. And, oh, yeah, the guy was white.

Now, Ty Cobb was like the rest of us. A highly imperfect being. Too quick to take offense. Too intolerant of those who did not strive for excellence with the same almost crazy zeal that he did.

But a racist? A dirty player? Not true.

What is true is that almost every accusation against Ty Cobb's character finds its roots in the same source, un-fact-checked articles and books published after his death by a bitter opportunistic journalist named Al Stump, whom Cobb had once threatened to sue for making up stories about him.

It didn't matter that Stump had spent little time with Cobb or that all of Stump's sources were anonymous. That sportswriters who knew Cobb rushed to his defense. Or that Stump himself had been banned from publications for writing lies. The scandal was titillating. And it stuck. When the legend beats the facts, print the legend.

Meanwhile, a good man's reputation lies in ruins. There are lessons to be learned here. First, it's all too easy to believe lies about people, especially successful ones. Lies take achievers down a few notches. And we like to hear that. And second, if a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes accepted as fact.

This has consequences because lies are the source of much of the world's evil, like the evil of destroying a man's legacy. In this case, a legacy that should be celebrated.

Ty Cobb was the most exciting baseball player of all time. He once stole second, third, and home on three consecutive pitches. He once had a (inaudible) to the pitcher, to an inside-the-park home run. He's not a racist or a cheat. It's time to tell the truth about Ty Cobb.

PAT: That's crazy. Yeah.

GLENN: Jeez.

VOICE: I'm Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty.

PAT: I mean, that's everything --

STU: Yeah.

PAT: -- everything you didn't believe about Ty Cobb in five minutes.

JEFFY: Nothing is sacred anymore.

PAT: That's amazing.

STU: It's incredible too. And you think about it in today's context with fake news -- first of all, fake news been going on for a long time apparently.

GLENN: Fake news -- if anybody doesn't think the king wasn't paying the town cryers to go out and cry out with fake news, you're crazy.

PAT: Oh, please.

GLENN: Of course, they were.

STU: It's been going on forever. And this is one, even as a person who has spent way too many hours focusing on sports -- we're all huge sports fans with, of course, the exception of Glenn who doesn't know the difference between baseball and football.

GLENN: I do. Yes, the ball size.

STU: Yes, right. That's it. That's the only difference.

PAT: Very good.

STU: But we spend a lot of time talking about baseball and --

GLENN: And the color. One is brown. One is white.

STU: There you go. Very good.

PAT: You could go with the shade. A little bit different.

JEFFY: Don't give him the answers.

GLENN: Okay. The shape. I said one is smaller. One is bigger.

STU: The point is, I even believed it. Right? I totally thought that was true. Great player, dirtbag. That was my whole -- you just believed that about Ty Cobb.

PAT: Yeah. Well, that's always the name that comes up when you're talking about Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame. You're telling me Ty Cobb is in the Hall of Fame, but not Pete Rose? I mean, look what he did compared to Pete Rose. I've heard that 100 times. One hundred times.

STU: Yeah. And look at, like, we all recognize this is true in the area, for example, for politics. FDR ended the Great Depression. Like, all these things that we know -- over time, you look at, and you're like, wait a minute. That's not right. This isn't right.

But when we get to -- there's a certain level of interest. Like if you hit -- like with sports, I'm interested in Ty Cobb because I think it's -- you know, I like sports. I haven't dedicated my life to looking at Ty Cobb like this author has. And it's like, when you actually look at these things, so many times, they're the opposite.

PAT: Tokyo Rose.

STU: Yeah, Tokyo Rose. You've done with Tokyo Rose.

GLENN: Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson.

STU: Woodrow Wilson.

It struck me -- it hit me initially because it was a sports reference. We had John Ziegler in here a couple weeks ago talking about the Penn State thing. And Joe Paterno being the main part of that. Of like, here's a guy who was fired, his reputation ruined, and really, in retrospect, it's pretty hard to make the case that Paterno in particular -- I mean, Ziegler goes even further than this. But Paterno in particular, it's hard to make the case that this guy had lengthy knowledge of these things and did something horrific because he wanted to endanger children. You know, it's -- it's really -- it's bizarre when you stop and you can get past the sort of craziness of the moment and really examine these things, how your opinion changes.

GLENN: I would love to hear -- in fact, no, I guess -- send it to PatGray@GlennBeck.com. I would like to hear who has been besmirched who needs to be restored?

PAT: That would be really interesting.

STU: Yeah, yeah.

GLENN: Whose credibility has been destroyed that needs to have it restored? And let's take it out of the last 20 years.

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: You know, because you can't --

STU: It's hard.

GLENN: It's too controversial the last 20 years.

PAT: Because you know it doesn't end at Ty Cobb and Tokyo Rose. There's got to be hundred of people --

GLENN: Of course not. That Tokyo Rose thing below blew me away. Blew me away.

PAT: Yeah. We had no idea. None.

GLENN: Yeah. You know, another thing I thought of is we should start -- because when Tokyo Rose -- she died in 2006. She died in 2006.

PAT: She was alive for a long time.

GLENN: Yeah, most of my life she was alive. Why didn't I ever talk to Tokyo Rose? Why didn't I ever reach out to Tokyo Rose?

PAT: We didn't know the story then.

GLENN: Right. But even not knowing the story, what happened? Why wouldn't we do that?

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: Who was it, somebody that just died -- and then today I saw the picture, the guy who -- you remember that really famous firefighter in the Oklahoma City bombing that was carrying the baby?

STU: Oh, yeah.

GLENN: The little girl. Remember that? He's just retired.

PAT: Oh, wow.

GLENN: It's hard to believe because he was young in that -- he's just retired from the fire department.

PAT: Jeez.

GLENN: We should find people from history -- the Tokyo Rose size, that are here, available, and just nobody is talking to, before they die.

PAT: Yeah, we should.

GLENN: I'd love to talk to some of those people.

PAT: That would be great. By the way, did you know that Ty Cobb hit over 300 three separate years?

STU: See, this is --

GLENN: This is going to happen now for three weeks.

PAT: Easily.

STU: We will be in the middle of a conversation about something totally different. And like, did you know he hit 420 one year? 420. 420.

PAT: The highest batting averages of all the time.

GLENN: And that's all he'll say. That's all he'll say. And we'll all go, huh. And then right back into the conversation.

Bill O'Reilly predicts this is what DOOMS Biden's reelection chance

Political commentator Bill O'Reilly joined the Glenn Beck radio program on Friday made an important prediction about President Joe Biden's chance of reelection in 2024.

O'Reilly told Glenn that former President Donald Trump was brought down because of COVID. "if COVID had not appeared, O'Reilly stated, "he [Trump] would have won reelection."

O'Reilly went on to predict that like Trump, President Joe Biden would lose reelection because of COVID. People saw a president who could not put out an intelligent fact-based message about COVID and people will remember that," he explained.

O'Reilly later added that "Trump and Biden are one-termers because of COVID."

Watch the video below to catch more of the conversation:

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

Critical race theory: Marxism is a religion

Uttam Sheth/Flickr

Marx didn't actually tell his followers that the system needed to be destroyed. And it's not what Marx actually believed. Very few Marxists actually understand what Marx laid out.

Marxism isn't a list of demands and instructions. It's Marx's attempt to tell the future. Some of it he got right, most he got wrong. For example, he predicted the rise of automation.

Believe it or not, Marx was not an anti-capitalist. If anything, he revered it.

In a letter to Engels, he complained that too many people misunderstood his message, that his plan is to merge with capitalism. To make it new. He wanted to reify his brand of socialism, reify is a Marxist term, actually. It basically means to make an abstract idea concrete.

Marx didn't hate capitalism. He actually thought it was necessary. And he knew communism would never happen without the aid of capitalism.

Marx didn't hate capitalism. He actually thought it was necessary.

From there, he takes these ideas to some weird conclusions. Horrible conclusions. The main one being revolution.

What does the first phase of the Marxist revolution look like? How will we know if it has started? How can we tell if it's already begun? Marx's idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," where the working class would rise up in revolution and earn their freedom.

But what did Marx mean by freedom? Like so much of Marxism, it involves giving up your individuality, in service to the collective: "Only in community with others does each individual have the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible."

That's from his book The German Ideology, which he co-wrote with Friedrich Engels, the guy who paid all of his bills: "Free competition, which is based on the idea of individual freedom, simply amounts to the relation of capital to itself as another capital."

His idea here is that capital ruins any idea of freedom or individuality. And competition is what he uses as proof. In other words, Marx's definition of freedom has nothing to do with actual freedom, freedom as we know it.

He wrote, in Capital: "It is not individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free."

He's saying that Capital manipulates our individual freedom and forces us to exploit ourselves. For someone who didn't believe in God, he sure had some fanciful ideas about the forces that control the universe.

For someone who didn't believe in God, he sure had some fanciful ideas about the forces that control the universe.

Marxists have always argued that capitalism is a religion. That our debt to capital is no different than our debt to God. Critical Theorist Walter Benjamin wrote an entire book called Capitalism as Religion, and wrote that capitalism is "the first case of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement."

There were many strains of socialism before Marx. There were entire movements, named after socialist and anarchist philosophers. But Marx was the one who figured it out, with the help of a rotating cast of people paying for his sloth, of course.

Marx's influence on socialism was so profound that socialism was practically re-named in honor of Marx. Marx has been deified.

He created a utopian society. Very hypothetical. It requires a working class that is devoted to daily readings of The Communist Manifesto.

This assumes that people who work all day — at a real job, where they can't just sit on the couch all day as Marx did — even have the energy to read dense theory when they get home.

Marx made a religion.

This post is part of a series on critical race theory. Read the full series here.

WATCH: Jan. 6 FALLOUT: Biden's Domestic Terrorism Threat Is YOU

The Capitol riot was foolish and tragic, but Pelosi's Select Committee "investigation" on the January 6 "insurrection" has devolved into a show trial complete with bad tears and bad acting. But this is just a charade designed to distract us.

What's going on behind closed doors is truly nefarious. The Biden White House and the U.S. national security apparatus are seizing that event to redefine domestic terrorism and expand the powers of government to prevent it. There is an alarming blueprint for sweeping government action called the "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism," put together by the National Security Council.

On his Wednesday night special this week, Glenn Beck exposes the collusion between the Biden administration and Big Tech to surveil, root out, and silence America's deplorables – all in the name of national security.

Watch the full "Glenn TV" episode below:

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

'They've taken away the symbol of the American flag': Restaurant owner speaks out after being FINED for flying flags on July 4

Terry Trobiani owns Gianelli's Drive Thru in Prairie Grove, Illinois, where he put up a row of American flags for the Fourth of July. But the city claimed he was displaying two of them improperly and issued him a $100 ticket for each flag.

Terry joined Glenn Beck on the radio program Tuesday to explain what he believes really happened. He told Glenn that, according to city ordinance, the American flag is considered "ornamental" and should therefore have been permitted on a federal holiday. But the city has now classified the flag as a "sign."

"Apparently, the village of Prairie Grove has classified the American flag as a sign and they've taken away the symbol of the American flag," Terry said. "So, as a sign, it falls under their temporary sign ordinance, which prohibits any flying, or any positioning of signs on your property — and now this includes the American flag. [...] The only way I could fly the American flag on my property is if I put it on a permanent 20 to 30-foot flagpole, which they have to permit."

Terry went on to explain how the city is now demanding an apology for his actions, and all after more than a year of small-business crushing COVID restrictions and government mandates.

"COVID was tough," Terry stated. "You know, we're in the restaurant business. COVID was tough on us. We succeeded. We made it through. We cut a lot of things, but we never cut an employee. We paid all our employees. I didn't take a paycheck for a year just to keep our employees on, because it was that important to me to keep things going. And, you know, you fight for a year, and you beat a pandemic, and then you have this little municipality with five trustees and a president, who just have no respect for small businesses. And right now, what I see is they have no respect for the republic and the United States ... I think it's terrible. The direction that government, at all levels, have taken us to this point, it's despicable."

Watch the video below to catch more of the conversation:


Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.