Geoffrey Norman reviews the new and revealing biography. An excerpt:
He was an aggressive base-runner, to be sure, and also crafty. He stole home a record 54 times, something you almost never see in the modern game. It is still thrilling, all these years later, to imagine Cobb on third in a close game and what that would do to the opposing pitcher’s nerves, something Cobb called creating “mental hazard.”
2 comments:
I grew up in Birmingham, where they filmed the baseball scenes in "Cobb" back in the mid-90s. I remember one newspaper writer (whose name I forget) worried about how they would portray a complicated man. In the end, the writer was very disappointed in the movie, saying it showed a violent racist psycopath rather than a real person.
Reading this review I'm also reading a new biography of Babe Ruth. I'm not certain Cobb was a worse man.
Daniel,
I was surprised by what the new book mentioned about Cobb. He's always been portrayed as sort of a monster.
Michael
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