Homefires: Southern Sports Edition

These two Southern gentlemen are famous for being sweet. How come?

Almost everyone who comments here is a guy. I'll laugh my tail off if nobody gets this.

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Congrats to Willard for ID'ing one of baseball's all-time greatest (and meanest) players, "The Georgia Peach," Ty Cobb.

Another hint: While it's almost certain that Ty was born without a soul, the other fellow in the picture had one, but lost it.

Last hint, another fabulous pic of the two:

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Congrats to Hookhead for giving a correct and definite ID on the tragic Shoeless Joe Jackson, the game's greatest natural hitter and an infamous member of the Black Sox conspiracy to throw the World Series, as our other mystery man. His answer for the sweetness connection is interesting, but not what I had in mind. If no one comes up with it this afternoon, total Shoeless points will go to the mighty Hookhead.

Do these photos give y'all the shivers the way they do me? I just love them.

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The "sweet" clue for Shoeless Joe was that he was "The Carolina Confection."

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I'll keep this short and sweet. The amount of time these write-ups took is the reason I stopped doing Homefires: Southern Music.

I've enjoyed reading about Ty and Joe since I was a teen. Others have carried the interest further and created large fansites for Joe. Ty didn't give a lot of love, so he doesn't get much in return, but he does have a nice official site.

There are lots of enjoyable quotes about Royston, Georgia's Ty Cobb. I'll just give a small sampling:

*"He's the dirtiest player around." -- Connie Mack
*"He's a prick." -- Babe Ruth
*"He's a total shit." -- Ernest Hemingway

These could go on forever, as no one was neutral about Ty Cobb. It will have to be presumed that he wasn't as bad as we've heard, as people seldom are. Even his famous deliberate slashings of other players with his pre-sharpened spikes may have been more planted rumor than fact. One Detroit Tiger team-member said that Ty never sharpened his spikes before a game, but liked the other team to think he did. Ty would do almost anything to give himself an edge, and considered mind games to be part and parcel of baseball. One of the people he practiced them on was his friend Shoeless Joe:

One of Cobb's most devastating approaches to baseball and perhaps the one that left the most lasting impression was his psychological intimidation. Cobb was having an incredible year in 1911, including a 40-game hitting streak. But by the end of the season, ”Shoeless” Joe Jackson had a 9 point lead on him in batting average. Very near the end of the season, Cobb’s Tigers had a long series against Jackson and the Naps. Cobb and Jackson were friendly both on and off the field, both being Southerners. Cobb used that friendliness for his gain. As he discussed in his autobiography, Cobb suddenly ignored Jackson whenever Jackson said anything to him. When Jackson persisted, Cobb snapped angrily at Jackson, making him wonder what he could have done to enrage Cobb. As soon as the series was over, Cobb unexpectedly started behaving friendly again. Cobb felt that it was his mind games that caused Jackson to "fall off" to a final average of .408, while Cobb himself sailed home with a .420 average, 248 hits, 147 runs scored, 127 RBI, 83 stolen bases, and the league lead in doubles, triples, and slugging average.

When summed up, he remains a supremely gifted player and a supremely nasty man.
Though he dominated the sport for two decades, when he died only four representatives from baseball attended his funeral.

Greenville, South Carolina's Shoeless Joe is a more sympathetic character than Ty, though he agreed to do one thing that Ty would never have done: lose. The greatest natural hitter, he was the most popular player in the game until Babe Ruth came along, and indeed the Babe patterned his hitting on Joe's, saying he watched Joe because he wanted to learn from the best. His glove was where "triples went to die."
Illiterate until middle-age, and maybe even a little simple, nonetheless Joe knew what he was doing when asked to help put the fix in, and it was the limitations and weakness of his character that made him take the money.
He always maintained his innocence.

Decades later, the two were destined to meet again:

In the 1940s, Joe was working at his liquor store when former adversary Ty Cobb and sportswriter Grantland Rice entered as customers. Following an impersonal transaction, Cobb asked, "Don't you know me, Joe?" "Sure, I know you, Ty," replied Jackson, "but I wasn’t sure you wanted to know me. A lot of them don't."

In the end, they still fascinate as much for the flaws in their character as for their exploits on the baseball diamond.

Recommended readings on Joe include Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series," W.P. Kinsella's fictional "Shoeless Joe," and Donald Gropman's definitive biography "Say It Ain't So, Joe!: The True Story of Shoeless Joe Jackson."
For watching: "Eight Men Out" and "Field Of Dreams."

Recommended readings on Ty include Ty's autobiography as he wanted his story told "My Life in Baseball: The True Record," ghostwritten by Al Stump, as well as the "secret" work Stump later wrote from his experiences ghosting the autobiography, "Cobb: A Biography."
Recommended viewings include "Cobb," starring Tommy Lee Jones, and once again "Field Of Dreams," if only for the wonderful scene of ghost baseball players muttering and grumbling at the prospect of Ty coming out of the corn to play with them once more.

Posted by floridacracker at October 1, 2006 12:15 AM