Farewell Jim Leyland

I'd argue Maddux and Glavine are absolute locks, and both are eligible on the 2014 ballot.

 

I'd also argue Bonds and Clemens are absolute locks, but at this point, I've given up on predicting what the silly BBWAA is going to do anymore.

 

We have been over this. One can think that PEDs are morally acceptable, but not morally acceptable within baseball at the time - or now. A vote against Bonds or Clemens is not necessarily a moral judgment. I am far from a moralist. I would vote for neither. Not yet at least.

 

Jim Leyland is still only 68. That's a hard 68, brother.

 

Neither have admitted to using or been found guilty of doing so in a court of law. While it's likely both juiced, it isn't 100 percent fact. And even if it was, both players put up numbers that were arguably the best of our time. I'd put Clemens just below Pedro in the best pitchers I've seen in my lifetime list. Bonds is the best hitter the game has ever seen.

If we're going to let guys like Ty Cobb in, then Bonds and Clemens (and Rose) need to be in, as well.

 

Todd Zeile?

 

No. They don't. Cobb's transgression - being a dick - is completely different than Bonds's and Clemens's transgressions. Which are all different than Rose's.

 

My post was about players on the Veterans Ballot, not the regular ballot. And under normal circumstances Glavine, much like Frank Thomas, would be first-time locks. But this ballot and the recent voting has shown to go against the previous voting standards, so I think you can really only say Maddux will be the only certainty.

Based on last year's totals, at most they could easily put in Maddux, Glavine, Thomas, Biggio and Morris. I think Bagwell and Piazza are too far behind to make a big enough jump this time.

 

Cobb was more than just a dick --- he was a psychopathic, borderline homicidal racist --- but yeah, that's never been against the rules of Organized Baseball.

 

Ty was very much a product of his times and surroundings. One of Ty's problems was that he never allowed his good deeds to be made public. When he was asked in 1952 if he felt blacks should be allowed into baseball, he said yes, very emphatically. He praised the play of Willie Mays.

Some black players from the old Negro leagues, when writing their memoirs, wrote that Cobb would sometimes go to their games, and go down into their dugout, and talked ball with their players. One former black leaguer wrote that he displayed no bad attitude or racially superior snobbery in talking to them. He spoke as one ball-player to another.

So, I feel that Ty simply wanted to be like those he knew & loved in old Georgia. Racially, he wanted to be like those people, and he trusted their instincts. He wanted racially to be perceived like them, no better, not worse.

 

I'm well aware of Cobb's psychosis, but he was far too intelligent a man to use that as an excuse. He attacked more than a few black groundskeepers and train porters, and he used to taunt Babe Ruth unmercifully about rumors he was part black.

There are a lot of historical sports figures whose less-than-progressive racial views can be at least partly forgiven. But Cobb wasn't one of them.

 

He liked to needle Babe Ruth by calling him a "n-----." Just because he knew it bothered Babe.

I feel that only some of Cobb's incidents were truly racial in nature, and others would have happened even if whites had been involved. I feel that Bungy and Stansfield were racist incidents and wouldn't have happened if whites were involved, while Collins, Harding and the Cuban baseball teams were not racist, and would have happened anyway. In other words, he was acting out wounded ego, as much as racial discord. He would have acted towards white persons who wounded his ego with his same ridiculous sense of "being insulted", as when he felt insulted by black people. His warped, twisted, sick, medieval sense of honor under laid many of his run-ins with both blacks & whites.

I'm not advocating that Ty wasn't a racist. Merely a racist who mirrored his origins. Which is not an acceptable excuse. No, not at all. But still far from the poster boy for racial virulence which he's now made out to be. And by those relative standards, Ty Cobb was a garden variety racist, who grew with the others, and who allied himself with blacks, in their long-term, historical quest to lock in their niche in BB in 1952, and built 2 long-term institutions to perpetually assist many blacks to better themselves educationally & serve their long-term interests in their medical needs. His record is far from good, but also far from the poster boy of racism that he's depicted as. How many acts of kindness to blacks he did & hid, we'll never know.