Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood by Steven Elliott Tripp (review)

Over a two-decade career, Ty Cobb dominated baseball, setting records for offensive production in nearly every category that mattered. More than a star athlete, Cobb was an American celebrity. Where he went, the press followed, as Cobb developed a reputation for daring, aggressive acts on the diamond and beyond. Historians of baseball have consistently recognized Cobb'srole in creating the modern game. Biographies of Cobb have appeared regularly in recent decades. Steven Elliott Tripp's Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood, however, demonstrates how a skilled historian can cause us to rethink a figure we believe we know. Tripp's book is one of the best recent studies not only of baseball but of southern and American masculinity as well.

Tripp shows us how essential it is to ground Cobb's conception of manhood, and consequently his entire baseball career and public persona, in models that Cobb studied while growing up in Georgia at the end of the nineteenth century. Cobb, explains Tripp, learned that honor was central to manhood and that honor depended on insisting that other men recognize one's standing and independence. Were racism and violence central to the culture that shaped Cobb? Of course they were. One of Tripp's great achievements here is to squarely address that fact, while demonstrating both the complexity of Cobb and the reasons he appealed so broadly to American men, who saw in baseball a game that required "brains, brawn, and bravado," making it "the ideal training ground for modernity" (p. 233). "Baseball," wrote Cobb himself, "is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men" (p. 1).

Cobb's conceptions of manhood clashed with those of his more demographically diverse fellow players, many of whom formed their "conception of honor" in the "factories, shops, bars, and fraternal organizations of the industrial North and West" (p. 163). Cobb's sense of honor, too, depended on others, but the others were largely his peers, among whom Cobb could demonstrate that he was "man enough to be a big leaguer" and against whom he might display his "gameness" (pp. 82, 179). His southernness indeed made Cobb conspicuous, but it was more than a matter of accent or racial attitudes. Baseball, Cobb believed, was a serious business in which one worked constantly to exact tribute from fellow players and the crowd. American men of the era saw in Cobb something that spoke to their sense that they were engaged in an arena of struggle. Baseball, like life itself, they believed, was a race in which "every moment is tense with anxiety, lest something already gained be lost," whether that something was a corporate position or the possession of second base (p. 234). Cobb worked to defend the reputation that he built. As a writer of opinion pieces and memoirs, Cobb wished to have others recognize that his will, daring, work, and drive were the keys to his success. While he might not have been sociable, Cobb displayed the "manly fortitude" that fellow players and fans prized (p. 178). Driving himself relentlessly, Cobb proved he could, to quote Christy Mathewson, "stand the gaff" (p. 179).

Throughout the book, Tripp shows a sure hand at setting Cobb within the broader context of American history, from the rural South to the urban world of the early twentieth century through the commercial boom of the 1920s. Chapter by chapter, Tripp corrects misconceptions and plain errors of fact that have obscured Cobb. On every page Tripp displays a thorough command of the scholarly literature on baseball and on American history more broadly. Anyone who wishes better to understand American masculinity and the appeal of baseball in the early twentieth century should consider Tripp's measured, persuasive reading of Ty Cobb.