TYrant of the Diamond

UNABASHED FANNAISM about the game has never a good baseball book but you can only take a good heart so for Charles Alexander is no doubt an unabashed tanatic about baseball as his detailed and trivial tilled biography of early great Ivy Cobb amply demonstrates skilled social historian and so his effort to detail a by gone era in American sports history had to excite the non-addles those limentable creations who really don't care that Harry Heilmann, the superb Detroit higher outrider goes four batting lives in odd numbered years.

It can't be said that Alexander didn't have the chance because he picked his subject well. The arguments about who was the greatest player ever will go on for as long as baseball means something and some lanes today first can't accept the proposition that any of the old timers could have measured up to today's stars in term of pure athletic ability. The arguments is advanced that today's major league players are drawn from a prospective player pool far wider than in Ty Cobb's heyday, so that the best are truly the best, not simply the luckiest. Still by any standards, Ty Cobb was the greatest player of his own generation, possessing a talent and mania for victory that would undoubtedly have made for success in any era of the game. As such and as the best paid player of his time, the game's first millionaire. Cobb was a lightening rod for America in flux in its social, economic, and political institutions.

Unforturately, Alexander doesn't give a satisfying glimpse into some of the broader issues surrounding baseball's early days of the 1910s and '20s as he dwells almost exclusively in effects on the stuff of fanatics the statistics, games and lore of Ty Cobb's baseball career and not enough on the tuff of the social historians for example what effect the emerging game had on American life. He hints at such a subject-for instance in his discusion of Cobb's tumultuous relationship with the fans-but leaves even the most rabid fan slightly testy as the outlines Cobb's incredible yearly campaigns in almost game-by-game detail.

To be fair, Alexander does offer a provocative portrait of the enigmatic Cobb, both as a player and in his deeply troubled personal life. Alexander is sympathetic to a man who despite incredible personal achievements and enormous wealth had few friends to the day he died Whereas nowadays we are assaulted with the pathetic little squeals of outrage over the behavior and arrogance of the Reggie Jackson's and George Steinbrenner's, Cobb, over the course of his 24-season career, managed to generate enough controversy to keep a whole squadron of Dick Young's clucking away at their typewriters for years on end. And Alexander gives a good flavor of the kind of psychological forces that could produce such controversy.

Drawing mostly from old newspapers and memoirs. Alexander meticulously traces Cobb's rise from his youth in Royston, Georgia as the son of a school teacher, to his stormy years of stardom with the Tigers in the first part of the century, to his bitter elder years as a rich iconoclast. A historian by profession (at the University of Ohio). Alexander provides a salutary antidote to the normal glowing style of sport biography, making it clear, despite all the sympathy, that in many ways Cobb was a jerk.

The most compelling portions of the book, indeed, are those which convey the unseemly, but too often prevalent, aspects of Cobb's personality. He was, for one thing, an unreconstructed racist of the most virulent nature. Alexander recounts in sickening detail the numerous incidents during which Cobb would unmercifully browbeat some poor Black busboy or servant. Cobb also had a streak of hot temper that plagued him throughout his entire career and afterwards, making him a host of enemies and dissolving much of the reservoir of good will that would undoubtedly have accumulated among fans and teammates owing to his spectacular on-the-field exploits.

And what exploits he performed. Cobb's statistics were mind boggling enough--more than 3000 games played, 4191 hits, 2245 runs, 893 stolen bases, and an unlikely ever to be equalled lifetime batting average of .367. But, true to the cliche, the statistics don't do justice to the kind of tyrannical dominion Cobb held over the playing field. "In general," Alexander writes, "Cobb viewed the baseball field as an area of harsh, unrelenting combat where he had to meet trick with trick.'" This outlook produced an intensely competitive player, whose willingness to take the extra base with spikes flying was illustrative of his no-holds-barred style of play--a style that intimidated a good number of his contemporaries.

Cobb's drive to succeed and the intense unhappiness he suffered as a result of his fits of anger, are well portrayed in Alexander's book, which offers a striking psychological portrait of the man. But instead of using this portrait as a jumping-off point for some broader observations, Alexander is content to stick to talking about baseball as a man with a Passion might--telescopically. The approach is not invalid, for Alexander offers a fair-minded and insightful biography. But this view is limiting and, ultimately, boring for the non-fanatic.

The national pasttime, pedestrian as it might sound, has been such an integral part of the American scene for over 100 years that it is possible to make some social history of it. Jules Tygiel, in his recent perceptive biography of Jackie Robinson, did just that, using the life of the man who broke baseball's color barrier as a rough metaphor for the desegregation of America. Tygiel's effort wasn't pretentious, because it was grounded in a proper respect for and devotion to the game irrespective of its broader relevance; but, in reaching higher, it offered a broader statement than simply just who Jackie Robinson is.

Alexander is keenly aware of trying to use baseball at large, and Ty Cobb is particular, to strike some larger themes. Just in his description of Cobb's evolving domestic life--from his childhood in Georgia through his two marriages--Alexander gives some personal sense of changing American lifestyles. And he hints tantalizingly at the industrial renaissance sweeping America in his fascinating discussion of Cobb's business acumen. For example, Cobb held massive investments in Coca Cola, which led to a lifelong security most ball players of his era, even the stars, never realized.

But Alexander dwells far too much on what happened between the foul lines rather than the action outside the ballpark. He paints an engrossing picture of a game in transition from the dead-ball era of stolen bases to the Ruthian age of the homerun, but never really shows the effects this had on baseball as a business, except to detail the contract feuds between Cobb and Tiger owner Frank Navin. He portrays Cobb as an ugly racist, but doesn't ever explore what Cobb thought about the desegregation of the game after he retired. Answering these questions might have provided an interesting glimmer of insight into American pop culture during the years Cobb lived, 1886 to 1961. As it is, Alexander offers a penetrating psychobiology of one of the greatest American sportsmen of the century. It's a lot of fun for the fanatics, but probably a bit tiresome for those who wanted a glimpse of life outside the diamond