Word: cobb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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UNABASHED FANNAISM about the game has never a good baseball book but you can only take a good heart so for Charles Alexander is no doubt an unabashed tanatic about baseball as his detailed and trivial tilled biography of early great Ivy Cobb amply demonstrates skilled social historian and so his effort to detail a by gone era in American sports history had to excite the non-addles those limentable creations who really don't care that Harry Heilmann, the superb Detroit higher outrider goes four batting lives in odd numbered years...
...today first can't accept the proposition that any of the old timers could have measured up to today's stars in term of pure athletic ability. The arguments is advanced that today's major league players are drawn from a prospective player pool far wider than in Ty Cobb's heyday, so that the best are truly the best, not simply the luckiest. Still by any standards, Ty Cobb was the greatest player of his own generation, possessing a talent and mania for victory that would undoubtedly have made for success in any era of the game. As such...
Unforturately, Alexander doesn't give a satisfying glimpse into some of the broader issues surrounding baseball's early days of the 1910s and '20s as he dwells almost exclusively in effects on the stuff of fanatics the statistics, games and lore of Ty Cobb's baseball career and not enough on the tuff of the social historians for example what effect the emerging game had on American life. He hints at such a subject-for instance in his discusion of Cobb's tumultuous relationship with the fans-but leaves even the most rabid fan slightly testy as the outlines Cobb...
...fair, Alexander does offer a provocative portrait of the enigmatic Cobb, both as a player and in his deeply troubled personal life. Alexander is sympathetic to a man who despite incredible personal achievements and enormous wealth had few friends to the day he died Whereas nowadays we are assaulted with the pathetic little squeals of outrage over the behavior and arrogance of the Reggie Jackson's and George Steinbrenner's, Cobb, over the course of his 24-season career, managed to generate enough controversy to keep a whole squadron of Dick Young's clucking away at their typewriters for years...
Drawing mostly from old newspapers and memoirs. Alexander meticulously traces Cobb's rise from his youth in Royston, Georgia as the son of a school teacher, to his stormy years of stardom with the Tigers in the first part of the century, to his bitter elder years as a rich iconoclast. A historian by profession (at the University of Ohio). Alexander provides a salutary antidote to the normal glowing style of sport biography, making it clear, despite all the sympathy, that in many ways Cobb was a jerk...