Everything We've Been Told About Ty Cobb For Our Entire Lives Was A Lie Made Up By One Author Who Slandered Him To Sell Books

One of those things that is like getting knocked over by a feather. If you love the history of baseball then you have heard all about Ty Cobb. One of the greatest players ever, but every stat has an asterisk and an anecdote. A "yeah but" is basically etched on to his hall of fame plaque at this point. Racist, violent, literal killer, dirty, sharpened spikes, and on and on it went. The stories bled into pop culture with the Ken Burns documentary "Baseball" and there was a barb in "Field Of Dreams"

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Finding out that Cobb wasn't racist and was an advocate for the integration of baseball blew my mind. He wrote to the commissioner to put rules in place to stop the sharpening of spikes. He basically did the opposite of everything he was said to be. I am sure he was a prickly sonofabitch. A hot head. I am sure guys hated playing against him. Those are all things that people say about guys like Jordan and Kobe though too. That doesn't make him evil. Doesn't make him a good guy either, necessarily, but people have been trying to cancel Ty Cobb for 60 years based on bullshit by one single dickhead named Al Stump. 

This is why the internet is great. I feel like it some ways it is actually much harder to control narratives and slander people in 2023 than it was 1963 when the biography about Cobb first came out. You can instantly defend yourself or your positions. There will always be an avalanche of haters in your mentions which skews the perception, but most people are generally good and understanding and will listen to you in my experience. Cobb didn't have that chance because he lived 100 years ago and then died before he could try to clear his name.