re: President Trump says he will pardon baseball legend Pete Rose

Cobb wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, to say the least, and probably had some emotional if not mental issues. Given the fact that his mother killed his father, whom he revered, with a shotgun when he sneaked into her room thinking she was screwing around on him, right before he came up to the majors, and the hazing he took when he came up to the Tigers wasn’t just cruel it was sadistic, it’s not surprising.

Plus the authors of the most recent, most accurate biographies have IMO gone too far in trying to show that because his father was anti-slavery and he had good things to say about Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, Cobb was secretly a bastion of racial tolerance. He was a man of his time, no worse or better than anyone else.

But he never sharpened his spikes, he never killed a man and he never beat up a Black groundskeeper and tried to strangle his wife (that story was made up by one of Cobb’s teammates who hated him).

He did go into the stands and start a fight with a heckler who used a racial epithet at him, and was rightfully punished, but the dude had a screw loose and had been screaming at Cobb literally for years when he’d come to NY to play, and he had both his arms, he was just missing all but two of his fingers.

The Stump writings on Cobb were utter bulls**t, he was a hack writer plus he was dealing with a man with terminal cancer, but the truth lies between that and folks who think Cobb divided the fishes and fed the multitudes.