Goldman’s baseball quotables #1: The Ty Cobb machine

Ty Cobb might have been the perfect athlete. He might have been the perfect human. If Al Stump’s transcriptions can be separated from his inventions with any certainty, then near the end of his life, Cobb said

“Temperamentally, I was always on edge, unable to take things easy, once the bell rang on Opening Day. I always figured every play to be close, and shot the works, which was both successful and a terrible physical drain... The tension can’t be escaped. I was like a steel spring. The slightest flaw will cause an overworked spring to fly apart, and then it is done for.”

Cobb practiced the negation of self and in so doing became pure action. Imagine a man capable of stripping away the illusion of personhood to reveal the operating system beneath, the machinery of survival, tens of thousands of years old and unburdened by any notions of identity or morality. This is what allowed him always to take the extra base, to go in spikes high, to bite, and perhaps -- as he claimed or as was claimed on his behalf -- to kill.

As reprehensible as we might find it, even Cobb’s bigotry against women and minorities was part of his pure, terrible perfection. His attitudes may have been conceived in ignorance, but they came from the same absence of mind that allowed him to hit .367 over the course of his career. His prejudices not only reflected the prevailing attitudes of his time and place of origin, but the purity of his not-thinking.

Unbelievers in evolutionary theory like to focus on the eye as a complex system unlikely to arise on its own. Actually, the eye is totally explicable. Would-be debunkers would have more success if they pointed to morality, a slippery concept more difficult to make consonant with Darwinism. On some level, Cobb knew that. (Humans may form communities or, for our purposes, “teams,” to better war with other “teams,” but Cobb was to learn via a relentless campaign of hazing that one’s teammates can be just as dangerous to oneself as the enemy outsiders.) Ever-changing and frequently suspended for risible reasons, morality was an arbitrary set of rules that Cobb knew a ballplayer of his time could do without.

She might have thought someone was trying to break in, and it is equally possible she recognized her husband and fired anyway. Given witness testimony that included a gap between the two shots, Amanda was indicted on a charge of voluntary manslaughter. When the case went to trial the following March, it took the jury only an hour to find her not guilty. So it was a tragic mistake. Perhaps.

Among the father’s final words to his teenaged son, as the latter embarked on the baseball adventure of which the former did not approve, was this curse: “Don’t come home a failure.” Forever denied all possibility of reply, Cobb played on as if the old man were still waiting, that someday would still have to answer to his father and justify himself. In this interpretation, Cobb became a madman trying to live up to the expectations of a ghost.

It wasn’t that. It was the opposite. Some combination of baseball and his father’s murder drove Cobb sane. He had always been prone to impulsivity and violence from childhood. The killing made that behavior a rational response to the world around him. Through his father’s death at his mother’s hands, an event that defies the expectation of an orderly progression to our lives and makes a mockery of the constellation of our relationships, he had glimpsed the reality of an arbitrary universe, unfeeling and cold with unprovoked violence.

In this way, Cobb was able to claw away the blinders of humanity’s ultimate invention, morality. For awhile, it made him all-powerful. “His determination was fantastic,” a contemporary remembered in The Glory of Their Times. “I never saw anybody like him. It was his base. It was his game. Everything was his.” Cobb said he “saw no point in losing, if I could win.”

Then the universe took its revenge. It made him old.