Herschel

I’ll never get to interview Ty Cobb, but his grandson Herschel is still around. He’s still got quite a few grandchildren around from what I understand, but Herschel was willing to talk to us. 

Now you can have Ruth, Gehrig, Johnson or even Mathewson. Sure, Wagner would’ve been cool to maybe ask about the whole t206 / tobacco controversy; and Shoeless Joe would make for a hell of a conversation on where his life was currently and what he still felt about the Black Sox scandal. But after that, my deepest curiosities about them are done.

To me, Ty Cobb is a mythological figure. But to this guy, he was just this sweet old man. While I was enamoured with the countless stories and folklore behind the Georgia Peach, this was really just somebody’s grandfather. 

Now if you told me I could go back in time and interview Ty Cobb, I still wouldn’t believe you… I’d find it beyond surreal. Just to give you an idea, that’d be like saying, “would you like to interview Paul Bunyan?” It just doesn’t seem like a real person because the stories are so gigantic, and all I know of him are grainy black and white photos.  

Herschel Cobb was an absolute class act, and he was willing to indulge me in everything related to his grandfather. My impression is that he does this with a lot of people though, so I kept my ego in check and reminded myself that this wasn’t an official interview either. It was a pre-interview to make sure I had good intentions. But while he could be spending his time doing just about anything else, he humored me and told me I could call him.   

I decided to record our first conversation. Mr. Cobb insisted that we have a discussion in the interest of topics, before he came on our show. Needless to say, I was excited. But I got the impression from this request that he’s probably been railroaded before and there might be certain topics he didn’t want discussed. And I was pretty sure I knew what those topics were: the sharpening of the spikes, his alleged murdering of a mugger, beating an unruly fan who was an amputee, etc. 

Though all of these things seem too outlandish to be untrue, none of them could be corroborated either. On top of that, would it really be fair to put it upon the man’s grandson to defend the actions or events of another man that may or may not have taken place nearly a hundred years ago?       

I can’t imagine having to defend every mistake my grandfather made at a time when I wasn’t even around yet.

As I stammered nervously on the phone with him the first time, trying to annoyingly prove that I wasn’t a kook, he patiently allowed me to explain myself. Finally he understood how I came to the conclusion that I wanted to get him on our show.

“Let me tell you how you got a hold of me,” he told me on our first call. “There is some kind of crazy baseball card forum on Facebook or something and I know that these guys found my address and posted it all over the internet.” 

“A little while back, a young man sent me some reprint cards of my grandfather for me to sign… now I don’t mind signing them, but this is the watered down soup of the soup.”

He’s being a bit modest. Herschel wrote a book about his upbringing (which was pretty rough) and the unsung hero of the story is his grandfather, Ty Cobb. Ultimately, he wrote the book for his kids, and not so much to debunk myths about his grandfather. But to me, his book, Heart Of A Tiger, is a hell of a counter to everything else that’s been written about Cobb.

Mr. Cobb spoke with me on the phone for over an hour. He was insightful and down to Earth. You could tell though that he has very little empathy for anyone who complains about a rough upbringing. He rose above a lot of shit himself, so victimhood isn’t something he entertains from others.

“Participation trophies…” I already knew which direction he was heading. “I don’t get it. I’m not on board with it. You have to understand, A.J., my example is a man who went to Detroit in 1909, at 19 years old, in a city he was unfamiliar with. No friends and not given much quarter or expectation to succeed or fail. He was just told by his father to not come back a failure. And he had no choice but to just work, and out-work everybody.”

You have to read his book to really understand, but Herschel didn’t have it easy either. I might even go so far as to say that he had it tougher. His parents were scary, abusive and altogether unstable. Witucki told me he had a really hard time reading about it. The first half of the book was extremely difficult for him to get through, and I believed it, because he’s one of the most loving fathers I’ve ever met. 

“I had to take several breaks,” said Witucki. “This guy just didn’t have it easy. His father was such a piece of shit… and his mother wasn’t much better. Any time his grandfather came around, you just wanted him to stay and save the day.”

He was right - Ty Cobb was the one untouchable figure in Herschel’s book. He had nothing but fond things to say about the man. But he also understood why the relationship between his father and his father’s father (Ty) was so volatile. Ty was competitive, he pushed and he expected more out of his own children. On top of that, he wasn’t around much. And on top of that, he didn’t always treat their mother well. 

“I’m more aware of those things now, but at the time, I couldn’t understand why my grandfather was so amazing and loving and my father was someone I was afraid of in a bad way. And I couldn’t trust him to not hurt me,” said Cobb. “And let me tell you, A.J. - when you can’t trust that your own father won’t break your arm while you’re wrestling around, it’s a scary life to live. He might flip a switch from playful to downright outraged in the blink of an eye.”

I could’ve talked to Herschel Cobb for the rest of the day, but I was afraid I might be spoiling our own show if I spoke to him for too long. He assured me that there was plenty we could talk about. He encouraged me to take notes and I told him I was recording our conversation and that I’d be going back to listen to it again before our interview. 

I had Witucki listen to our conversation as well. By the end of it, we were confident there was no exhaustion of topics. We could talk to him about collectibles, the scrapbooks he inherited, Cobb’s playing career, memories not included in the book, and anything else we might want to talk about.

The last thing I told him I’d like to mention, but we don’t necessarily have to go into depth about: Al Stump. He agreed. In fact, he said he had plenty to say about that bastard.  

    

***

Perhaps I should’ve started with Al Stump. What can we say about that guy? Well, he sure knows how to sensationalize a story. Or rather, make up one. 

In his day, not only had Stump been discredited on numerous occasions, he’d been blacklisted from publications all across the country for making shit up. And though I know the concept of honest journalism is a bit cloudy these days, accuracy is something I value when telling a story. 

And he just couldn’t seem to do that.

Al Stump violated the #1 rule in journalism over and over again to further his own name. And he got away with it. And he made money off of it. And it’s hurt the Cobb family for generations.

What can we really say about him? The damage has already been done. Herschel had a few stories about the man that I didn’t know. One of which involved an engraver who got in touch with the family and wanted to make it known about a few times where Stump had brought in either a silver or crystal bowl and paid for inscriptions such as “To Al Stump, a great writer and a hell of a friend. Sincerely, Ty Cobb.” Stump would later sell these pieces (after Cobb’s death) to various collectors or auction houses for a nice chunk of change. If this wasn’t a testament as to how dishonest the man could be, I don’t know what was. 

One of the worst things he ever did though, was help write Cobb’s autobiography, which was published (again, after Cobb’s death) and was proven to be highly fictionalized. Years later, the book was turned into a movie starring Tommy Lee Jones. Though the story was incredibly entertaining, very little of it turned out to be true. 

Again, the damage had been done and it added to an already loaded and dark mythology about Ty Cobb that had been exaggerated for over a century. We had to ignore the shyster who had found a way to take advantage of a sports icon and villainize him for his own evil monetary benefits.   

All Witucki and I could do was talk to the man’s own grandson. The plan wasn’t to get him to exonerate or defend his grandfather for any of the tall tales we’d all become familiar with. No, it was to get him to share his own memories of the man he personally knew. To him, Tyrus Raymond Cobb was a bit of a savior. Spending summers in Lake Tahoe with his grandfather served as a safe haven and some of the few happy moments in an otherwise dismal and abusive childhood.

Herschel is probably my favorite guest. It’s been difficult trying to top him. I thought I knew a lot about the first man ever inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, but this man had firsthand, personal accounts of the Georgia Peach. And I couldn’t contain myself. Once the time finally came to having him on, I don’t know how I made it through.

He dug up some of Cobb’s personal scrapbooks and showed them off on camera during our Zoom call and we were beside ourselves. These were museum-worthy pieces he was showing us and I was honored to have them shown on OUR show. It was a treat, and it floored me that no one else had ever done an interview to this depth with Herschel or allowed him to share these relics that once belonged to the man himself.

My favorite anecdote about Cobb was when he’d go into town with his grandchildren and someone would talk to him completely unaware of who he was… “You know, I’ve heard that Ty Cobb lives around here somewhere. Maybe if you’re lucky, you and your grandkids might cross paths with him!”

Then, in an act of total modesty, and not wanting to draw time or attention away from his grandchildren, he’d say, “perhaps we will! That would be swell.”