This Month
Michael Street Reviews Tom Stanton's
Ty and the Babe: Baseball's Fiercest Rivals
Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2007 12:00pm
Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, the classic antipodes of baseball, represented their respective styles during the change from the dead-ball days to the today's live-ball era. Cobb, the fierce and scientific competitor, squeezed the game for every inch and every split second, battling his way around the basepaths foot by bloody foot. His spikes were as legendary and vicious as his tongue, and both would cut opponents to ribbons. Ruth, the jolly fat man who happened to be able to blast a baseball farther than anyone had ever imagined, erased the hard-fought arithmetic of Cobb's ninety-foot battle around the bases with a single mammoth clout. If Cobb was the terrible creep of World War I trench warfare, Ruth was the atomic bomb that made him and all that he represented obsolete. Jovial, garrulous, and notoriously fond of women, food and beer, Ruth ushered in the new home-run era as the hateful Cobb sat and steamed, hurling racist insults at his rival.
Or so the story goes.
Tom Stanton, baseball historian and journalist, sets out to tell the tale of these two legends through a little-known part of their rivalry: a 1941 golf championship, held after both had retired. Along the way, Stanton lets us see unexpected sides of Cobb, taking a strictly contrarian view of the way he's often portrayed. As Stanton shows, the public persona of both men remained far after their exploits on the diamond faded from memory, and today's views of these two men is likely more distortion than fact.
Stanton begins the book by tracing the two player's baseball histories, paying special attention to the seasons and games they played against one another. He shows how Cobb and Ruth's rivalry developed, as Cobb's dominant Tigers and the lowly Yankees of the first two decades of the century swapped places, to the more familiar underdog Tigers losing to the all-time great Yankee teams of the late twenties. More than this, Stanton explains these rivals' public personas, how Ruth soaked up the spotlight with his overpowering personality, while Cobb often came across as critical, combative, and abrasive. In time, they came to embody the game's change from the scrappy, hard-bittten, hit-and-run style of the last century to the apparently effortless, celebrity-soaked slugfest it is today.
1941 held its own significance, perhaps whetting the baseball world's appetite for such a colossal matchup. That season would see Ted Williams hit .401, DiMaggio set his 56-game hitting streak, and the Brooklyn Dodgers outlast the St. Louis Cardinals in an epic pennant race (see my review of Baseball in '41 for more on this incredible season). In a year where these aging legends were quickly being replaced by the next generation of superstars, it seemed the perfect time for this "Has-Beens Championship."
The golf championship that occupies the second half of the book was a friendly one, even though journalists and spectators tried to inject it with their fierce rivalry from the baseball diamond, drawing parallels between the sports as well as the two rivals. While Ruth would clearly be the longer driver, they opined, with his share of trouble in the rough, the slap-hitting Cobb would play the superior short game, perhaps using some of his renowned psychological tricks against his supposedly simple-minded opponent. Even before Ruth accepted Cobb's challenge to face him in a seventy-two hole bout, sportswriters were salivating at the similes such a contest would provide them.
Though there was some back-and-forth via telegram about the parameters of the tournament, with both men trying to outfox and outpsych the other, the showdown seemed predestined. Pressed by PGA tour manager Fred Corcoran-who would later become business manager to Ted Williams and Stan Musial-Cobb and Ruth accepted the challenge. The games would be played at three venues—near New York, Boston, and Detroit, to capitalize on the fan bases of both stars-with the proceeds going to an orphanage in New Hampshire. Each leg would feature match scoring, where the winner had to win the most individual holes rather than end up with the lowest overall score.
Less than a third of the book is dedicated to the actual tournament, with even less time devoted to the games themselves, but the match is less important than Stanton’s subtext, about the private personas of these two often-caricatured men. Ironically, the men performed much as these clichés might predict, as Cobb practiced hard, playing mind games with Ruth, while the Sultan of Swat practiced erratically with little conditioning, relying on his talent to carry him.
During play, Cobb employed a meticulous style, lining up putts and inspecting fairways like a pro, which wore on his opponent both psychologically and physically. Ruth's poor shape- and, perhaps, his impatience with Cobb's plodding pace- meant he wore down quickly and took very few holes in any of the tournament's back nines. Cobb won the first leg outside Boston, while Ruth won in a playoff outside New York, setting up the tiebreaker near Detroit, which was won by the hometown favorite, Cobb.
In the end, what seemed less important than the outcome is the chance to view these legends once more, especially the tattered legacy of Cobb, known for his fierce competitiveness, for sharpening his spikes before games so that he could slide "with his steel showing" against the hapless infielder taking the throw. Though he long maintained that he slid spikes- high only when necessary, Cobb was reviled by his fellow baseball players, who universally agreed he was a vicious and dirty player. Right?
Wrong. Cobb's style was very much in tune with the rough tactics perfected by John McGraw and the Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s, a team that routinely cut basepaths short when the umpire's back was turned, held the belt loops of opposing runners to keep them from advancing, and generally played in a scrappier style. Yet McGraw and many of his Orioles teammates- Hughie Jennings. Ned Hanlon, Willie Keeler- are remembered merely as great players. Cobb, because of his frequent dust-ups both on the field and off, is considered the vicious and dirty one. Stanton addresses, both directly and indirectly, why this is so.
The virulent racism we so often associate with him was, regrettably, a feature of Northerners and Southerners alike. The 1910s and 1920s had more lynchings than any other comparable period in U.S. history. When Cobb was suspended in 1912 for attacking a fan for spewing racist insults at him, all of his teammates supported him, horrified by the suggestions of miscegenation in those insults. And if we remember Cobb for being a sharp-tongued bench jockey, it's worth remembering that both players and fans were far more vocal in those days. Rookies could be derided so mercilessly by their competitors that they quickly washed out of the big time. Cobb may not have been Little Lord Fauntleroy, but he was undoubtedly not Adolf Hitler, either.
Stanton, like Richard Bak and other Cobb defenders, shows Cobb's softer side as a gentleman and good father (unlike Ruth, he remained married to the same woman his entire life) and offers testimony from plenty of Cobb contemporaries who called him an outstanding player, and who made a point to say that he was never vicious or underhanded. Up until Ruth's death, surveys of baseball writers and the general public typically named Cobb as the greatest player ever.
Only after Babe's tragic appearance at Yankee Stadium, his once-booming voice shushed by the throat cancer that would soon consume him, did Americans accept him as the fallen tragic hero. As time passed- and Ruth's game eclipsed Ty's antiquated version- more and more voters named Ruth to the top spot in baseball history, and Cobb's legend became darker with age. Popular images of Cobb, from Stump's muckraking Cobb to Tommy Lee Jones' movie of the same name, have only reinforced this stereotype of the fierce, vicious, win-at-all-costs Georgian.
It becomes easier to put people in categories and pigeonholes, especially when they're no longer walking the earth, and the Cobb-Ruth dichotomy is certainly appealing for its simplicity, even if the truth lies elsewhere. Reversing the image of a player whose name has been so broadly lambasted is not Stanton’s only point in his book, but seeing these two supposedly opposite players having fun amidst their supposedly hateful rivalry, it's hard not to take his view.
Well worth reading by fans of any generation, Ty And The Babe, like the golf match it describes, is about far more than a game between two fading legends. It's about the way we create those legends, and how they frequently mask, as much as accentuate, the men behind those public personas. At a time when the Mitchell Report is casting a long and dark shadow over the legacies of many legendary players, it's important to remember how easily such distortions are created and absorbed by fans and journalists alike.
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