Originally Posted by
Hawgdriver
Just finished Ty Cobb, A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen. I'd recommend it to any of you who follow sport, enjoy a good yarn, and have an abiding preference for truth in spite of what everyone else thinks. That Copernican motif of "no, the earth isn't actually the center of the universe" is present here as Leerhsen methodically shreds the myth of Cobb as racist murderer.
I would have preferred the author make a more data-driven approach to justifying Cobb's status as the greatest player to play the game. What I mean is less reliance on batting average and RBIs, and more use of sabermetric measures. Although batting average conveys much of Cobb's production, it doesn't do him enough justice. Sometimes such a book could get bogged down in numbers and math, and alienate a broader readership. Perhaps, but most baseball nonfiction readers tend to be amenable to the discussion of "advanced" metrics, if not outright proponents.
That grievance is small beans, though, in the bigger picture of the quality of the author's research and presentation of it. Great stories, vivid pictures, and hell, I finished it quickly. I wasn't all that aware of the myth of Cobb as devil before this book, and vindicating Cobb's legacy wasn't big on my list of crusades prior to this book, but now I am eager for the next time the discussion about greatest ever ballplayer comes my way.