Cobb Triumphed on Field but Was Stumped in End

Tyrus Raymond Cobb might have been the greatest baseball player who ever lived. No worse than second greatest, surely.

You couldn’t get him out. The greatest pitchers in the game tried. Walter Johnson, Ed Walsh, Chief Bender, they all fell short. Twelve times he won the batting championship, three times he batted better than .400 and .370 was a bad year for him. The leagues, the commissioners, even the law agencies couldn’t set him down.

But Ty Cobb struck out swinging when he came up against a junk-throwing, mild-looking non-pitcher from a newspaper city room.

You might say Ty Cobb got caught looking by Al Stump.

Al wasn’t really trying to fan the great Cobb. He was just trying to get him to hit the ball someplace. Al was doing Cobb’s biography at the time. It was only a paycheck for Al. He had no thought of striking out the great Cobb, ruining his reputation for all time.

Like all casual sports fans, Al knew Cobb had the reputation of being a spiteful, intensely competitive individual who would spike his grandmother to score a run and who had a tempestuous career in the grand old game. He didn’t play a game, he waged it.

But the romance of baseball being what it was, these were considered quaint, even mildly amusing traits on the part of Cobb, part of his mystique. No one ever reported that Cobb was just this side of a homicidal maniac. No one seemed to notice his teams seldom got into a World Series or questioned why.

Stump, who was to spend 11 months with the dying, raging, almost psychopathic Cobb, found out why. This was no beloved, aging athletic hero. This was a monster. Stump felt like a guy who has blundered into Dracula’s castle under a full moon before it was over.

What happened to Al Stump--and Ty Cobb--is the subject of a remarkable movie on the subject, “Cobb,” which opened last week with Tommy Lee Jones starring as the storied Georgia Peach. It is an Academy Award performance in a very disturbing picture of what fame can do to a person ill-equipped to handle it.

Cobb was the way he was for a very depressing reason: In his youth, his mother shot his father through a window of the family home, mistaking him for a prowler. Revenge is probably the most ignoble--but powerful--of human motives. And Cobb’s whole career was, very likely, one long attempt to get even with society for the fact that his mother slew his father. The movie makes the point that the mother’s lover did the killing, but movies are notorious for reinventing history from a safe distance.

Whatever the truth, Cobb set out to make the world pay. Pitchers, fielders, fans, owners, managers, waiters, croupiers--even his own family and what few friends he had were to feel his vengeful wrath. It probably made him the transcendent baseball player he was (lifetime batting average, .367). He fought with teammates as enthusiastically as with adversaries. Cobb, quite clearly, hated the world and everyone in it.

He was a rich man. He got in on the ground floor of the Coca-Cola Company formed by adoring fellow Georgians, so he could indulge his sociopathic attitudes to the fullest. He treated people as if they were curveballs inside.

Al Stump looked to him to be someone he could go five for six against. But he went 0 for eternity. We never would have known about this unholy demonic light that glowed in Cobb if it weren’t for Stump. The pen was mightier than the curveball.

In the old days, sports journalists pretty much restricted their coverage to runs, hits and errors. The coverage stayed pretty much between the foul lines. The writers had to know what kind of out-of-control human Cobb really was, but they spared the public. They let Cobb bask in a prism of his own accomplishments. Athletes were our new royalty. Cobb should have been in therapy. Or in prison. Instead, he was in the Hall of Fame. The first one there, in fact.

Stump wrote his obligatory fawning biography as contracted. But then, he dashed off a magazine piece that brought the real Ty Cobb into focus, a man a long way from the idol of the basepaths usually chronicled in the journals of his day. Cobb got thrown out at home by Al Stump.

Actually, baseball men always knew with whom they were dealing. Only three baseball personages showed up at his funeral.

But, after Al Stump, the world knew. In his 11 months at the side of the legend, Stump got a look inside. And recoiled at what he saw.

“Cobb” is only the latest manifestation of the fact that Al fanned Cobb with the bases loaded and the game on the line, stamped him indelibly for the future. In “Field of Dreams” a few years ago, a scene showed a passel of deceased legends of the game coming back from the afterlife to play ball again and, to a man, they refuse to bring that Cobb with them. They are portrayed as despising him.

Cobb was a strange man, a violent man. You remember his eyes. Even in old age, they bespoke a fury within, the eyes of someone you dealt with only at your peril.

He belongs to the ages as a misbegotten hero, like a statue of Stalin torn from its pedestal and lying in the rain, despised, vilified. But was he as unrelievedly megalomaniacal and deranged as Tommy Lee Jones portrays him?

Cobb always said he was misunderstood. He was misunderstood, all right. Until a trained journalist got a look behind the headlines. Cobb finally found a pitch--and a pitcher--he couldn’t hit. Stump popped him up.