Check out 'Cobb,' where entertaining lies foretell the 2020s media hellscape: Way Late Baseball Movie Reviews
Cobb, a buddy comedy where two flawed men wave guns at each other, is worth seeking out if you like fictions that reveal dark and dank truths. The latest in a series of baseball movie essays...
There is, as the late great Phil Hartman elocuted in one of his final voicings of Lionel Hutz, the truth and ‘The Truth.’ Nearly all of what appears in the 123 minutes of Cobb belongs in that right-hand column. And yet is it still strangely enjoyable.
The real Cobb was exhumed by author Charles Leerhsen in Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty (Simon and Schuster, 2015). It won the Casey Award as the best baseball book of the year published in the United States (and Canada!). I made a point to check it out from the public library and read it before trying to see if the biopic is salvageable. Leerhsen, spoiler alert, sneers at the movie for signal-boosting the largely fictitious Cobb that Al Stump and enabler Ron Shelton put into the world.
Why is the movie worth a watch, when it is sourced from discredited material? Whelp, there is something universal in the emotion and spirit that courses through it. It comments on North American hero-worship, and the paranoia and bitterness that faded famous people can have about being forgotten. There are many elements — a late-in-life famous man getting confronted with his harmful behaviors; a sports figure wanting to tell their story, kind of like branded content; and entertaining lies that might betray something painfully honest about how we can all be terrible sometimes. In other words, this forgotten ’90s movie essentially forecasts the 2020s.
One part of the story that holds up is that Ty Cobb, as a lion in the late winter of his life, was worried about his career surviving the test of time. Cobb was the first truly celebrity ballplayer in the days before the invention of the radio and lived long enough to appear on and enjoy TV. His biographer Leerhsen has established that Cobb understood recency bias decades before there was a name for it. An appearance on a 1950s game show where a celebrity panel was stumped to identify Cobb as the all-time record holder for career batting average1 was kind of a trigger for the Georgia Peach.
Furthermore, Cobb contains nice execution. However, Tommy Lee Jones was in his prime as an actor when he took on playing a 74-year-old Cobb (and the playing-years Cobb in flashbacks) when the legendary ballplayer links up with sportswriter Al Stump (Robert Wuhl) to work on his autobiography. The chemistry and timing between the two performers make it believe they would develop a codependent parasitic-symbiotic relationship. In truth, the real Stump made up most of the story and how much time he spent with Cobb.
It is a buddy comedy where two effed-up guys both wave guns at each other! Talk about an elevator pitch for a date movie. Not! Roger Ebert praised it, even as he wondered what possessed studio execs to greenlight the movie in the first place. It also did not help that the movie was released in the middle of the 1994-95 baseball strike when the players walked off the job while being used as a proxy in a feud between big-market franchises and small-market franchises.
Prior to Cobb, Jones had been in Blue Sky, The Client, and The Fugitive within the previous two years. Batman Forever (1995) would be his next big role, and he would also play off Will Smith in Men In Black (1997).
It is hard to imagine a popular actor of that era who could project the menace that the movie needs better than Jones at that stage. He was an ex-jock who started on the offensive line for the Harvard Crimson in the 1960s. Ivy League football was still taken seriously enough in those days that a running back from Cornell could finish a close second in the voting for the Heisman Trophy (Ed Marinaro, who went on to the Minnesota Vikings, Hill Street Blues, and Blue Mountain State). Secondly, and more pertinently, Tommy Lee Jones is known to be a grumpy, ornery guy, so taking on this role was barely a stretch.
He was as much of a natural for the role as Robert Redford was for Roy Hobbs in The Natural (1984). But one movie takes a darkly cynical first novel by Bernard Malamud and injects it with 1980s optimism and nostalgia for an America that never existed. Cobb has the rawness of early ’90s movies, but it is not so easy to pin it down to the time and place when it was made.
Shelton was on a heater in 1990s Hollywood. Writing and directing Bull Durham (1988) made him a heavy hitter for sports movies. Cobb was one of five such features that he made in the ’90s. Two are also very good: White Men Can’t Jump (1992) and Tin Cup (1996). The other two are not even worth mentioning.2
And then there’s Cobb. And then there’s Cobb!
The story is set in 1960, the last full calendar year of Cobb’s life. The great man is residing in a home in the Sierra Nevada region of California when Stump arrives to begin their collaboration.
Since Stump served as a film consultant, the movie presents him as one of America’s top sportswriters. The reality, per Leerhsen, is that the publisher engaged him since they knew he was ‘fast copy’ and could be trusted not to spend 80 percent of his advance on cheap hooch and callgirls, and probably waste the rest. Stump is the ears, eyes, and knotted stomach of the audience as he wonders WhatTheBlueHell he got himself into with Cobb. That resonates with anyone desperate and dumb enough to try to pay their bills by typing words for public consumption.
(Calisse de tabernac, Sager — beaucoup projeter?! — Ed.)
Compromises in journalism… that’s catnip
In case that is not apparent enough, their first writing session includes Cobb firing a round from a pistol after Stump rejects his opening line for their as-told-to tome. That sets the tone for a movie where two hardheaded men with a lot of self-regard wrestle for the steering wheel of the car and editorial control.
Movies that pose questions about the compromises in journalism are catnip, guilty as charged. And Cobb got into this in 1994. Most of the communication arts were still analog at that time, but their running debate sort of intuits the 21st century and the rise of branded social media, tightening of media access, The Players’ Tribune, and other contemporary contagions.
Nuance is nowhere to be found as the two men, who clearly deserve each other, careen through snowy mountain roads, Nevada casinos, and the highways and byways of the U.S. en route to Cooperstown, N.Y., for a testimonial dinner at the Baseball Hall of Fame. It is very over the top, never more so than in a scene where the two men fight over a Reno waitress played by London, Ont.-born Lolita Davidovich, who is the real-life wife of Ron Shelton.
The movie is inventive about trying to get at truths about the nature of celebrity. The problem, of course, as A Terrible Beauty lays bare, is that Stump was so shameless in exploiting what people were willing to believe about Ty Cobb that calling him a fabulist lets him off far too easily. The movie closed the book on his decades of turning Cobb into a side hustle. He died at age 78 in 1995.
The True magazine takedown piece that Stump filed in 1961 was hardly questioned in its time. It was included in the 1999 anthology The Best American Sportswriting of the Century.
Leerhsen’s biography shows how we can get carried away with outlandish stories about a public figure. Leehrsen was once an executive editor at Sports Illustrated, and he did the gumshoeing to show how Stump was very inventive.
The origin story of Cobb’s mania is actually true. His father was shot to death by his mother when Ty was 18 years old and about to go up to the majors with the Detroit Tigers in 1905. While he was a Southerner born just one generation after the Civil War, characterizing him as a fire-breathing racist was definitely reductionist. There were men in Cobb’s family who were outspoken abolitionists.
Stump made up essentially everything else about Cobb, to the point of putting counterfeit memorabilia on the market. The movie dignifies all of that, without even getting the architecture of Cobb's childhood home correct.3
There are some well-done flashback scenes, including an opening film short, that brief the late 20th-century audience about how Ty Cobb played baseball. Another vignette, with Roger Clemens playing a Philadelphia Athletics pitcher, captures the badass way Cobb played a game that you supposedly cannot play with your teeth clenched, at least according to George Will.
The beat of that is correct. Leerhsen writes in A Terrible Beauty that Cobb attacked baseball by becoming “a mental hazard” to the opposition. He was somewhat like peak-career Rickey Henderson in that regard.
Per Leerhsen: “Cobb spent the first half of his life trying to seem unhinged, and the second half explaining that he had been acting deliberately the whole time.”
You know the sloganeering about first impressions. That passage probably should have been highlighted for Roger Clemens, who definitely presented as unhinged on more than one occasion. Since Clemens has a quirk of only wanting to talk about what happened between the lines, there is no readily available explanation of how he ended up taking a role in a period baseball movie. Either way, Kingpin will always be peak celluloid Clemens. He plays a guy named Skidmark with an anger problem and a fondness for “ASS, GAS OR GRASS” trucker hats.
Cobb won the American League batting title when that was the biggest deal there was in 12 of his first 13 seasons as a full-time player. The ‘black ink’ in the two more pertinent slash stats, on-base and slugging, illustrates his total dominance before Babe Ruth went to the Yankees and gave up pitching to focus on hitting 50 home runs every year.
Cobb led the AL in slugging eight times, including six seasons in a row. Only Rogers Hornsby, who was truly a bastard, and Ruth, ever pulled off that. He also led the league in on-base percentage seven times. Ted Williams and Barry Bonds are the only two batters in the last 90 years who have topped the .433 career OBP of Cobb. Only two active batters in MLB — Mike Trout and Joey Votto — have got on base at a clip north of .400.
Cobb was the all-time leading base stealer until Lou Brock passed him in the 1970s. His record for base hits, the most overrated counting stat, lasted until Pete Rose passed him in the mid-’80s.
His real prestige career counting stat should be runs scored. A team, duh, has to score at least one run to win a game. The runs record Cobb set lived nearly long as he did. Cobb lived to the age of 74. Seventy-three years passed between his last game in 1928 and Henderson becoming the One Great Scorer in 2001.
The movie trades in the sensationalized and largely invented version of Cobb, and not an actual person. It is cleverly done, especially with a mid-movie callback where a hallucinating Cobb believes a newsreel is showing all the Really Bad Stuff He Supposedly Did. You can free-associate that with any number of famous American men — Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein — who got their just desserts in the course of #MeToo’s movement.
Truth is more complex than the world of Cobb, of course. A syndicated sportswriter from the Northern California Bay Area, Wells Twombly, once observed there were only a “handful of baseball characters whose reputations did not exceed their true personalities.” Those words to the wise are lifted from page 451 in, wait for it, The Best American Sportswriting of the Century. It was mentioned earlier in this essay.4
Since Cobb came and went from screens when I was a high school student, biopics, and facts-based fiction, have only become bolder and more inventive about recasting the life and times of famous people. And that is good, so long as real-life people aren’t mischaracterized and reduced to obstacles to the heroes’ greater glory (looking at you, Aaron Sorkin and Moneyball!).
The world needs more creative storytelling. Our media literacy likely benefits from being spoken up to and encouraged to balance two competing thoughts — enjoying the entertaining lies, while seeking the verifiable. Helping people develop the ability to distinguish and discern is how we dig our way out of a deep hole of disinformation and misformation.5
Cobb works as a character study. The emphasis is on a character. Ain’t that the truth. Without italics.
Cobb’s career average has since been revised to .366. Another Detroit Tigers slugger, Miguel Cabrera, leads active players at .307.
Shelton wrote and was executive producer of Blue Chips (1994) and director-writer of a boxing movie called Play It To The Bone (1998).
In the film, Jones’s Cobb changes his telling of how William Herschel Cobb was shot to death by his mother, Amanda Cobb. In each version, his father climbed onto the roof of a porch outside a second-floor bedroom. But the Cobb home in Royston, Ga., was a one-storey house.
Edited by Glenn Stout and the late David Halberstam.
“No, dig UP, stupid.”