re: Ty Cobb's 10 tips on how to a hit a baseball

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Was expecting more racism

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Cobb enthusiastically supported the integration of major league baseball when he was asked about Jackie Robinson in 1952. He told The Sporting News, “The negro has the right to compete in sports and who’s to say they have not?”

He called Roy Campanella a “great” player, said Willie Mays was “the only player I’d pay money to see” and after Campanella’s crippling car accident, praised Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley for holding a candlelit tribute “for this fine man.”

Even back in the 1920s, Cobb would befriend Negro League ballplayers such as Detroit Stars infielder Bobby Robinson, who said “there wasn’t a hint of prejudice in Cobb’s attitude.”

One of several blacks employed by Cobb, Alex Rivers, named his son after the ballplayer and said, “I love the man.”

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Why the determination to brand Cobb as the worst racist ever? Stump apparently believed a more sensational book would lead to more sales. But a large part of the story, Leerhsen notes, is simply that the accurate perception of Cobb as a hothead simply got mixed up with the fact that he was born in Georgia in 1886. Bad temper, Southerner: Must have been a racist.

That’s both too broadly damning — not only were Southerners not necessarily racist, Cobb’s own father fought for better treatment of blacks — and it lets us off the hook too easily.

Detecting sin in someone else is a way of announcing to the world, and to yourself, your own virtue.

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