OleMissCub

How pissed are the Dodgers right now

Happ's final season: .369/.492/.672, 14 HR, 18 doubles Bryant's: .329/.493/.820, 31 HR, 13 doubles, 3 triples God knows how many HR's Bryant hits (and fatalities he causes) if they were still using the old aluminum bats when he played. Bryant played his home games in one of the most pitcher-friendly stadiums in college baseball. Here's what Harper did at age 17 at the little college he played at while using the old bats .443/.526/.987, 228 AB's, 31 HR, 23 2b, 4 3b, 98 RBI So ya, give Bryant those old bats and holy cow.

And we got two of them (maybe 3, don't remember Happ's stats) in Schwarbs, Bryant and Happ. Happ's final season: .369/.492/.672, 14 HR, 18 doubles Bryant's: .329/.493/.820, 31 HR, 13 doubles, 3 triples God knows how many HR's Bryant hits (and fatalities he causes) if they were still using the old aluminum bats when he played.

For comparison sake, this is what Schwarber did his final year at Indiana against (for the most part) inferior pitching. .358/.464/.659, 14 HR, 16 doubles, 6 triples, 48 RBI It's rare to see hitters be truly dominant in the college game since the introduction of the BBCOR bats.

Cops just realized he's the same guy whose crackpipe burned down the interstate.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2702713-former-mlb-player-otis-nixon-reported-missing-by-local-police

Brent Rooker, a RS Junior OF for Mississippi State, is hitting .448/.558/1.008 with 15 HRs, 19 2Bs, 4 3B's, 56 RBI, and 14 steals in 33 games. He's having easily the best offensive season since the bat change to the BBCOR.

''tis not man, but beast!"

He outlived most of his contemporaries for one thing. Secondly, there was indeed a bit of a kickback to the book. At the time, and I suppose this isn't surprising, the main thing that people took from the book was the whole "dirty ballplayer" thing and not the race stuff. Stump came up with stories about Cobb sharpening his spikes and intentionally kicking people in the chest or running over first baseman, etc., all done for the purpose of pure maliciousness. I can't recall the exact details, and I believe it's in Leerhsen's book, but at some point in the early 60's, The Sporting News sent out a questionnaire to a bunch of surviving deadball players and asked a bunch of general questions about who was the greatest player they ever saw, the best ballpark, best baseball city, etc. However, due to Stump's book, one of the questions they asked was about whether or not Cobb was a dirty ballplayer and whether he tried to hurt fielders. Only one or two out of like a hundred thought that he was. The consensus answer was basically "no, he wasn't a dirty player, we all played very rough back then. I never saw him go out of his way to hurt anyone." One of those who responded that he was dirty was Carl Mays. Although I'm not sure Mays has a lot of room to speak since he was a notorious head hunter and is responsible for throwing the pitch that killed Ray Chapman. No doubt Mays' opinion of Cobb is different than most since Mays was someone that Cobb actually DID try to hurt deliberately. Cobb and Chapman were good friends, having served together in France during WWI. Cobb, right or wrong, held Mays personally responsible for Chapman's death due to Mays' headhunting ways and he made the media aware that he blamed Mays personally. During their first meeting following Chapman's death, Cobb spiked the hell out of Mays after Mays threw at him, likely in response to all the hoopla Ty was generating. Here are Mays' words in the 1960's about the incident: some pics:

oh sweet lord what a pretty pitch

Strop is broken

http://i.imgur.com/TzJUSof.gif

I'm just conceding that yes, no doubt the guy was racially prejudiced, as typical of most everyone back then, but the label of "racist" shouldn't apply to him anymore than it would to Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, Smoky Joe Wood, or any other ballplayer born that year. It's an interesting thought. The average person with any sports knowledge knows who Ty Cobb is because of the Stump myth. You've got the Soundgarden song, the movie, the Field of Dreams reference (which is interesting since Cobb and Jackson were good friends and Cobb financially supported Jackson for years until Joe's death in the early 50's.), the Ken Burns series, etc. None of these pop culture references exist if not for Stump's BS. I think that without the Stump book, Cobb would obviously still be a well known name to the likes of you or I, but to the average person he'd be a Walter Johnson or a Grover Cleveland Alexander.

Just check out the book. It's a fast read, is enlightening, and a lot of fun since it deals with deadball era baseball so much. The best story in there that I never heard about involved Joe DiMaggio. Somehow a young DiMaggio had found out that Cobb had negotiated his own contracts back in the day. When the Yankees came calling to sign him when he was like 19 and playing in the PCL, DiMaggio wrote Cobb for advice and Cobb ended up ghost-negotiating the contract between Joe and the Yankees and Joe ended up getting like 4 or 5 times what the Yankees had originally offered.

Thing is, there are NO DOCUMENTED instances of him being racist. There are no documented instances of him doing anything ugly with racial motivation, not by actions or words. This is something that Leerhsen harps on quite a bit in the book, which by the way is a fascinating read and has won tons of awards. He was stunned to not come across anything verifiable about him being a racist. As Leerhsen wrote: "“If you stick to the facts, and not the myth or the assumptions about someone born in Georgia in 1886, it's very hard to make a case for Cobb being racist.” Quite the contrary actually. His grandfather was a notable Southern abolitionist and had to go into hiding to avoid being killed for it during the Civil War. His father was the most progressive Georgia politician during his time (before famously being killed by his own wife at 42 the day before Ty was called up to the bigs). His father repeatedly put forward legislation to improve black schools (always failed) and broke up multiple lynch mobs, physically putting himself between the black men about to be killed and the mob themselves. So yes, it does matter because it's unfair to besmirch someone's character for being a racist when there is no evidence that they were (in early 20th century terms).

boo defense

no horsefeathers, huh. The narrative that a good ole' boy from Georgia was a racist piece of horsefeathers didn't exist before the 60's? No. Go try and find that narrative about Cobb before Stump. I know you never will, but if you read the book you'd see that Cobb was always viewed as one of the more progressive baseball players regarding race relations during his playing days and after retirement. This is in contrast to the actual baseball bigots back then like Rogers Hornsby or Enos Slaughter, etc. For example, in one of his interviews regarding the prospect of integration, Cobb told the Sporting News: "the Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly" Also, he was hardly what you would think was a "good ole boy". His dad was a Senator and he had an appointment for West Point lined up when he decided to go try and play ball instead. He was a theater actor and also wrote hundreds of articles for newspapers across the country during his playing years and after. He helped organize the first players union, negotiated his own contracts, and after baseball became a multi-millionaire businessman. He was no tobacco spittin' rube. It's amusing how married you are to this idea about Cobb. Leerhsen talks a good deal in his lectures about people like you who are so bought into the current Cobb narrative that they are practically incapable of opening their mind to an alternative narrative. Even when presented with evidence that many of the Cobb stories they believe in were entirely fabricated or the facts of which were deliberately misrepresented, they still won't change their minds.

I think this is becoming more popular to believe about Cobb. I know Bill James thinks he's massively misunderstood as a character, which isn't to say anyone thinks he was a good guy. Bill James is also a Joe Paterno apologist so horsefeathers that guy. There's a certain segment of baby boomer and gen X white guys who don't like seeing old sports heroes being tarred with the truths about their dickishness. Or maybe people have heard lies about someone be repeated so often that the sheer repetition of it began to feel like evidence to them, especially when it has been repeated by respectable people. Quite literally, the entire "Cobb as a racist monster" narrative that exists in our collective baseball ethos sprung entirely from Al Stump's biography of Cobb, which upon inspection is far more fiction than biography. That narrative simply didn't exist before the early 1960's when the book was published. For example, when Leerhsen, former executive editor for Sports Illustrated, started to dig into the evidence about Cobb's fights in his quest to repeat the "evil Cobb" narrative for a new book, he realized that almost every black person involved in these fights were white according to census records. It turns out that the "black night watchman" that Cobb attacked for being uppity was actually a white person who ended up receiving a harsher penalty than Cobb because he was drunk on the job AND was the aggressor. Court records show that he pistol-whipped the hell out of Cobb. What Leerhsen's book is saying is that Cobb, though not the easiest person to get along with and someone who battled childhood demons his whole life, was not "baseball's black mark" as Okrent said. Far from it. He was well liked by fans and most fellow players as evidenced by the fact that he was the first player elected to be in charge of what eventually became the Player's Union and was the first player elected to the HOF. Going into the stands to attack a fan? That's certainly unacceptable behavior, but it actually happened quite a lot back then. Other Hall of Famers that did that: Cy Young, Christy Matthewson, Rube Waddell, Ed Walsh, and Ruth did it on two occasions. What's forgotten about during that incident with Cobb and the fan is that his teammates were also in the stands right behind him going after the guy. Then, when Cobb was suspended, the Tigers went on strike because they felt he was justified. It was the first players strike in MLB history. In fact, the reason that the incident had any notoriety at all wasn't because he went into the stands, and wasn't because the man was handicapped (he was missing fingers on both hands and it's unlikely Cobb could have known that before he went up there), but it was because of the player's strike and the farce that ensued because of it. Instead of cancelling the game, American League representatives went out to the local neighborhood and literally fielded a team of guys off the street. With the actual Tigers watching in street clothes from the stands, the "faux-Tigers" lost to the Athletics 24-2. The "faux-Tigers" pitcher still holds the MLB record for most hits given up by a pitcher in a single game at 26. Was Cobb a racist? Of course he was. So was almost every other white person born in the country in that era. However, as Leerhsen points out, there is zero evidence for him being involved in any racially motivated hostility. On the contrary, he was one of the very first players to call for integration and was a staple at Negro League games, throwing out the first pitch on dozens of occasions. In fact, when he died several black newspapers mourned his loss for being a friend to the black ballplayer. How in the world does that jive with how Ken Burns' baseball portrayed him or how Tommy Lee Jones did? It doesn't jive because the Cobb as racist monster narrative was fabricated by Stump to try to make his book juicier. Him stabbing a black man for being uppity? Fiction. Him choking a black man for shaking his hand as he rounded third? Fiction. Him attacking a black waiter and nearly killing him? Fiction. Him pistol whipping someone to death? Nope. Him throwing a black maid down the stairs at a hotel? Made up. I suggest that some of you go check out some of Leerhsen's interviews on YouTube. Pretty interesting to listen to. He was just so appalled to find out in his research just how much of Stump's book was entirely fabricated (as in "let me just make up a story and put it in the book"...it's that bad) and how the public's perception of Cobb before Stump and after Stump are so insanely disparate. Indeed, Bill James is a bit of a kook. Leerhsen, on the other hand, is a very well respected journalist and author. and ya, tl/dr

Piscotty would have been out in 1902

I guess these count. Just got them. Game ball cufflinks. These came from the August 2nd win against the Marlins. http://m.ebay.com/itm/252640959877?_mwBanner=1

Just checked and indeed it was

That was ugly basketball at the end. Both teams were clearly gassed. That said, amazing shot. Refs tried to give UCONN the game with that bull crap flagrant foul call and the announcers were wholeheartedly agreeing with it.