Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

by Stephen Jay Gould

  I honor and value post-Boutonism, but may this fresh wind not blow us too far from the founding subject. The old hagiographies, at worst, relied on invention and hypocrisy, but at least they talked about baseball and told us how their heroes hit a curve and slid into third base. The new books, when they are good, fill in dimensions previously excluded and give voices to a variety of players ignored by the hagiographers. But, when bad, the post-Boutonian books get so tied up in their sociological analyses (the highfalutin ones) or smarmy kiss-and-tell exposés (the vernacular versions) that baseball recedes into a barely relevant background.

  Al Stump’s second book is a fine post-Boutonian biography, but the movie version, Cobb, has been a crushing failure (and may not even be released nationally) despite some wonderful acting by Tommy Lee Jones. I think that director Ron Shelton lost his bearings and forgot his subject. He became so intrigued with Cobb the aged psychotic that he forgot Cobb the greatest ballplayer who ever lived. Shelton begins with a “newsreel” epitomizing Cobb’s playing career, but the rest of the movie is a chronicle of Cobb’s dying year, his relationship with Stump, and Stump’s anachronistic struggle about integrity. We never again see Cobb on the ball-field.

  Hal Crowther, reviewing Stump’s second book in the North Carolina Independent, wrote:

  [Cobb’s] sickness was a distorted reflection of our own. You can make a case that he influenced the outcome of more major league baseball games than any player who ever lived. The question is whether that achievement means anything at all, considering the pathology of the athlete and the human cost he incurred.

  At ten, I would have waffled on that one. Now it’s clear to me that the answer is “No.”

  Well, it is not clear to me; and I think the answer is “yes.” What price glory, to be sure. Cobb was a vicious bastard, and he brought misery to many around him. But baseball is a beautiful game, an important part of our history as a nation, and a joy and comfort in the lives of millions (if ever the pouting players and owners end their ridiculous pissing contest and return the institution, which they have only borrowed for a while and for their profit, to its true custodians, the fans). And excellence in any honorable form—that rarest and most precious of human accomplishments—must be praised, despite the toll often exacted on the achievers and the victims of their obsessions. Cobb was the greatest ballplayer in American history—and baseball doesn’t kill or maim.

  Assessing importance is so much a matter of scale. Cobb sowed misery during his living moment to a small circle of people in his direct orbit. But moments and orbits recede as the generations roll, while unparalleled excellence emerges and holds fast. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs looked terrible to any particular Tyrannosaurus witnessing the impact, but worked out wonderfully well for surviving mammals millions of years later. Who knows or cares any more about the foibles of Aeschylus or Sophocles, but I trust that we shall watch Agamemnon and Oedipus Rex as long as humanity persists.

  No one can say of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, as Antony did of Brutus, that “his life was gentle,” or that “the elements / So mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up / And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’” Cobb was monomaniacal, and he paid the personal price. But we might say of him, “This was a ballplayer!” Such a judgment should be enough to give life value. Render to Ty Cobb what he couldn’t give to others. His viciousness cannot injure anyone anymore; the excellence of his play endures.

  1 Gould would later realize that he had slightly misremembered the moment—Larsen’s pitch had actually been high and outside. See page 315. [Ed.]

  1 Richard Sisk of the New York Daily News Sunday magazine (March 27, 1988) wrote a funny article about the sabremetric studies of three Harvard professors—Purcell, Dudley Herschbach, and myself. It ran with the precious title: “Buncha Pointyheads Sittin’ Around Talkin’ Baseball.”

  1 In fact, it was the tenth inning. [Ed.]

  1 This year’s New York baseball books also include two collections from two singular personalities—a Bible of all key statements in and about Stengelese in The Gospel According to Casey by Ira Berkow and Jim Kaplan, and an amusing selection, presented as blank verse but unaltered in text, of the meandering stream-of-consciousness musing developed as a broadcasting style by former Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto, in O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto, edited by Tom Peyer and Hart Seely.