Ty Cobb still lights up the theater

Ty Cobb is in town for a short homestand, the Detroit Tiger prowling center field at a modest theater across from Joe’s Smog Check. Not a big place. Seats about 90, or roughly the number of folks Cobb beat the living spit out of in his long, terror-filled career.

With Cobb, to know him is to hate him.

Think today’s athletes have anger management issues? Think they struggle with impulse control? Bunch of cupcakes.

Look at some of the stunts Cobb pulled:

— In New York, he confronted a one-armed heckler and nearly stomped the man to death.

— Angered over the price of liver, he once pulled a gun on his butcher and trashed his shop.

— In spring training, he fought a groundskeeper over the condition of the field, then choked the man’s wife when she tried to stop it.

“Ty Cobb did for baseball what Sherman did for the popular conception of war,” playwright Lee Blessing once noted.

Cobb wasn’t a ballplayer, he was a Greek tragedy in knife-sharp cleats. The imperious loner had ‘roid rage before there were ‘roids. As ESPN once noted, “He was a pain ... but a great pain.”

All this is evident in Blessing’s brawny one-act play “Cobb,” now appearing through April 7 at the Lonny Chapman Theatre in North Hollywood, Gregg T. Daniel directing.

I’m here to see it with my buddy Costello, who doesn’t follow baseball so much as he uses it as ointment to soothe life’s wounds. Being a Boston Red Sox fan, this has mixed results.

As the theater lights dim, Costello is telling me the three things he wants to tell Bud Selig ... and boom, the aging Cobb steps up, sounding like Richard III.

I like live theater for the language, the resonance, the acoustic timbre of the human voice, but I have to confess I don’t go a lot, except for those venues where you can buy beer and peanuts between innings.

But we are both, Costello and I, blown away by the spirit of this literate 23-year-old play, the truisms that the playwright discovers in the course of profiling one of the most rapacious and thrilling ballplayers who ever lived.

Cobb would make any short list of deeply flawed American success stories — gangsters, robber barons, corrupt presidents. Like them, he shared an almost delusional sense of his own importance. And ruthless psychosis always snares our interest, in politics or the batter’s box.

So what I’m struggling to say is that you don’t need to be infatuated with baseball to enjoy this fleet, 80-minute play. In short, you can take your spouse. Or, Costello, if he’s available.

The way he’s done it, this Blessing, is to have three actors portray Cobb at different stages: as a young player (Daniel Sykes), as a middle-aged businessman (Bert Emmett), and as a cancer-ridden retiree (Kent Butler).

Sometimes the three actors are on individually, sometimes they share the stage, arguing among themselves. In one scene, they wind up pointing guns at each other.

Into this troubling world steps Oscar Charleston (Jason Delane), in a particularly nice turn as a Negro League player. Charleston, dubbed “the black Cobb” for his style of play, spends much of the play confronting Cobb over his overt racism.

What I usually hate about character studies is the way they end up trying to justify anti-social behavior.

There is little of that here, except perhaps in the back story of Cobb’s demanding father, who was shotgunned to death by Cobb’s mother when she (pick your version):

1) Mistook her husband for a prowler.

2) Shot her husband when he tried to catch her with a lover (an early use of the designated hitter).

That might be enough to throw anyone off his game, but three weeks later, Cobb is roaming center field for the Tigers, a player so arrogant and ambitious that teammates nailed his shoes to the floor and sawed his homemade bats in half.

“If I was destined to play a child’s game my whole life, I’d play it like a man,” he explains onstage.

Baseball “never knew what it wanted until I came along,” Cobb says. “I was too real for myths — you couldn’t sell what I was.”

Sound familiar? But bundle up Barry Bonds, Michael Vick and Floyd Mayweather, and you still wouldn’t have the dysfunctional behavior of a Ty Cobb.

“Great lives suffer great tragedies,” he explains of his ultimately sad journey.

All I know is that by the time he retired in 1928, Cobb had stolen home 54 times, the most audacious play in sports (Jackie Robinson had 17 such swipes). He’d set 90 major league records, some of which still stand.

And so, thankfully, does this beauty of a play.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

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