Sammy Sofa

Yeah, for at least a couple innings now it looks all fuzzy no matter how many times I try to restart it.

A Tebow home run at least gave us this magnificent Derwooding. Maybe he's not all that bad.

REPENT, HEATHENS: [tweet]https://twitter.com/TitanicBaseball/status/850144688950607872[/tweet]

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. Agreed.

Or maybe he's actually truly switched sides and is doing it to spite you, by forcing your pee break to be shorter than preferable. This team is just one big pee break right now. I'm chugging as much water as I can so I can be in the bathroom instead of watching.

I swear, Dex is doing them an intentional favor with some of these horrible 1-2-3 swinging K AB's he's having.

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). Dude, you're all over the place; one post you're all, "of course he was a racist, as it was the style at the time," and now you're yelling at me like we have to acquit because the hood does not fit. If Ty Cobb wasn't a racist or not, I really don't care; I'm more curious as to what you think of the rest I said. Honestly, I think non-bastard Ty Cobb would be all but forgotten except when showing up on stat lists broadcast factoids. Oddly, his horrible reputation arguably did him a favor and actually made him a legend. "Amazing player/horrible human being" is, for better or for worse, MUCH more memorable. A reformed Cobb is potentially a forgotten Cobb.

I think you could argue pretty well that someone like Jeter and Brady are pretty similar figures/celebrities relative to their respective sports. Griffey is a good example of a singular player who became one of those next level-type figures. It's hardly impossible, and personally, I think you're going to see more guys along those lines as the game goes forward. I don't know if you think I'm agreeing with everything Stark is saying, and I don't; I just agree that baseball has had a dearth of big time marketable players for a while (but I don't think this is necessarily terrible or pointing towards a bad fate for the sport; I just agree in that it's a thing that has been going on for a while that wasn't always the case) and I'm optimistic the Cubs can help change that. I think "the health of the game" or whatever is fine; it's not going to go south if it keeps chugging along without big national stars. I just like the idea of seeing those types of guys again, and I like the idea of the Cubs supplying them.

I work hard, and I post hard.

Epic triple post.

Personally:

Eh; ultimately that's a really long way of saying "Ty Cobb was not as racist or as much of an horsefeathers as you think." I mean, yeah, in a micro sense it's interesting to old timey baseball dorks, and it's obviously not a bad thing to see history corrected via something like Leerhsen's book...buuuuuuuuuuut is it really any kind of deal at all that the relatively few people who give a horsefeathers about Ty Cobb think he was more racist than he actually was? Like, if anything, it weirdly hurts Cobb's legacy if he's less of a bastard. That people think he was such a remarkable scumbag is pretty much the only reason he's any kind of a widely known historical figure. Amazing stats, sure, but the dustbin of history is piled high with the almost totally forgotten legacies and lives of some of the greatest baseball players of all time. If you save Cobb's reputation, you're kinda just killing him, too.

Heyward Fan is going to be ESPECIALLY irrational after a rainout, d'uh.

I agree about how it's been, but I think a lot of things are changing for the better and pro baseball isn't going to stay as relatively regional and "obscure" as it has been thanks to MLB slowly but surely wising up with things like online clips and MLB TV and the network, and so many younger players rejecting the "unwritten rules" [expletive] that makes everyone so boring. Most of the best guys for years and years have had the personality of a cheesecloth, due in no small part to how willfully boring and well-behaved baseball has tried to be for so long. I don't think it's any coincidence that things like Joey Bats' epic bat toss get so much more attention than, say, Mike Trout's entire existence. As the game ages out of the sticks up its butt I think you'll see more players getting individual attention. Of course, dumb horsefeathers like the blackout rules doesn't help, but even with that, nothing is really all that "regional" in this day and age. That seems more like a dying leftover of a different time than something that is strongly persisting.

I don't think it's something "wrong" with the sport; most great baseball players usually being boring schlubs isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just is what it is, and hopefully this is yet another area the Cubs can capitalize on by being awesome while having a bunch of young, likable, charming dudes making up most of their roster.

Welcome! You should look out for TruffleShuffle; he lives in Austria, too!

Cubs dominating just in time to solve baseball's lack of an identity: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/19074938/where-all-mlb-superstars-gone

it almost makes having a job, worth it? Who punctuated this post, Lionel Hutz?

Eat horsefeathers AKA Provel.

Even the butter cake is something they inexplicably tried to steal as their own; that horsefeathers is totally a Mid-Atlantic German/Dutch thing.

To be fair, he's talking about taking a drunken shortcut across the field. In the nude.

I feel like they would serve this by having Multiple Miggs fling it at you: http://i.imgur.com/WJOvQG5.jpg

There's nothing weird about hating St. Louis food.