Trouble is, the truth of the matter is now obscured. We won’t find out exactly what happened but it’s clear the common image of Cobb as nothing but a mean son of a bitch is off the mark, but he was no angel either. And Cobb’s life wouldn’t be the subject of scrutiny if he wasn’t arguably the best baseball player who ever lived. There were plenty of rotten baseball players who didn’t make the record books.
Did he ever explain why he didn’t want to hit home runs? It sounds like an odd choice.
I could make a guess, and it would tie in with the dislike of the “three true outcomes” that’s heavily influencing baseball. Even if the analytics are correct, it seems intuitively wrong that swinging for the fences and otherwise striking out is somehow better than putting the ball in play, especially looking for just getting contact and trying to “hit it where they ain’t” or even a bunt attempt. Same with all the other small ball that doesn’t seem to be in the game these days.
So I could be wildly wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the reasoning was something like “that’s not how baseball should be played.”
We seem to be getting a little bit off the topic of Jackie Robinson.
Cobb LOVED Roy Campanella, who of course was Black, and claimed Campanella was one of the greatest catchers who ever lived.
I may have mentioned this in the past but there is a quote frequently attributed to Cobb that Campanella was the player who most reminded him of himself and Willie Mays (also Black) was the one player he’d pay to see. I’ve always wondered if this wasn’t an error, and someone mixed up the names, because Roy Campanella was NOTHING like Ty Cobb, but Willie Mays very much was. Cobb was a center fielder, extremely fast, had been a very young superprospect, and became baseball’s most feared multi-talented player, which is pretty much a bang on description of Willie Mays. Roy Campanella was certainly a great player, but he was a catcher, slow as hell, and his only consistent offensive skill was hitting dingers.
That’s how baseball goes.
To get back to that, in the end, the answer to the OP is no because, ultimately, no one refused. There was allegedly talk of strikes, most notably in the case of the Cardinals - this isn’t proven, I have to stress - but the league was treating the entire thing as a fait accompli and refusing to play would have been career suicide. The result would have certainly been lifetime banishment.
The closest anyone got to refusing was, as noted above, Dixie Walker, who allegedly complained to the Dodgers and asked for a trade - according to most accounts because he was concerned people back in Alabama would be unaccepting of this. However, Walker WASN’T traded until after the 1947 season, and he and Robinson both played great in 1947, got along just fine, and afterwards spoke highly of each other. I think it fair to say having Leo Durocher there during the initial resistance helped.
Anyway, Walker isn’t a Hall of Famer; he was a terrific player but the productive part of his career was a bit too short.
Leehrson’s book mentions multiple “errors of fact” in the Stump/Cobb autobiography about events on the field - such as Buck Herzog catching and playing second base on the same play, placing Cy Young and Lou Criger on the wrong teams, etc.
Leehrson describes Lucker’s campaign of harassment of Cobb from the stands, including previous use of racial invective targeting Cobb’s mother. The verbatim comments that were the immediate cause of Cobb’s going into the stands are not presented.
Did you find any press reports that mentioned Cobb’s supposed boast at the time he hit those home runs? The story about him in effect calling his shot(s) always sounded a bit fishy to me, though I have no doubt Cobb could have hit a lot more home runs at the expense of his batting average.
I haven’t read Stump’s 1994 biography of Cobb, which is described as being far more detrimental to Cobb than anything appearing in the ghostwritten autobiography of 1961 (even that one paints Cobb as not only antagonistic but violent off the field and prone to gloat about his opponents’ misfortunes). What Leeehrson spends the most time debunking is Stump’s nasty, sensationalistic piece in True magazine in '61, “Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight To Live”, which Leehrson refers to as “painted in lurid Tales from the Crypt colors” while using contemporary reports to address Stump’s claims of having spent most of that time with Cobb (when it was more like a few days at best).
Cobb and Jackie Robinson were alike in at least one key respect. They were disruptors who threw off their opponents’ game, largely through daring on the basepaths.
Changing how you hit isn’t that easy, and it wasn’t easy at all to hit homers back then. Cobb did win a home run title…with 9.
There is no reliable sourcing at all on that story. It makes no sense. While it WAS conventional wisdom that trying to hit home runs was not wise strategy because you’d just fly out a lot, actually hitting a home run was obviously considered the best thing you could do. If Cobb could hit two or three home runs a game at will, he’d have done it. His 5-homer outburst has all the hallmarks of something where that story would grow AFTER the fact.
Cobb must have played on huge farm fields, sometimes with no ‘wall’ defined. Cobb would have loved larger fields to pick up extra base hits, he wouldn’t waste his time trying to get one over the ‘wall’.
One of the issues was that most of Cobb’s career was during the “dead-ball” era, when offense was generally not high, and home runs were uncommon. A big part of this was that one ball might be used for most of a game, growing increasingly harder to see (and hit) as it became dirty and scuffed, as well as becoming more difficult to hit for distance, as it became softer through use; another factor was that “doctored” pitches (spitballs, shine balls, emery balls) were legal, and a third factor was that a number of major-league parks had very deep outfields
During the dead-ball era, home runs were simply not common; that era is generally considered to have ended in 1919, when Babe Ruth set the AL record for home runs in a season with 29.
Well, that was the record for either league. Precisely whose record he broke depends when you start counting; Ned Williamson hit 27 home runs in 1884 but if we’re going post-1901, it was Gavvy Cravath’s 24.
The dead ball era didn’t just end; it was a gradual process. In 1920, when Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs, the average TEAM that wasn’t the Yankees hit about 40. In 1921 it was still only about 65.
Cobb’s only two seasons with double-figure home run totals (12) came in the “live” ball era. An impressive achievement for someone who choked up on the bat and often used a split-handed grip.
Cobb said that he didn’t think it was exciting baseball, that it was more thrilling for a batter to single, steal second, then head home on a close play at the plate. He liked the idea that the runner had the chance of being throw out instead of trotting around the bases.
To hell with his team winning. Pretty selfish, if you ask me.
You’re actually saying that Cobb played to lose? Perhaps the most serious competitor in the history of baseball? Both biographers stressed that aspect of his game.
He thought a team could win without the home run and put out a more exciting product. That a close play at the plate was more exciting than watching someone trotting around the bases.
You may disagree, and he could have been wrong, but Cobb was all about winning. He just thought you could win without the home run.
Cobb was free to his opinion about which game was more exciting. But professional sports are a business. So the opinion that mattered most was that of the fans. They liked the power game. And this in turn influenced the owners to favor it by introducing the lively ball, parks you could hit homers out of, etc.
These changes made it harder to win games against teams that hit for power. Cobb’s ability to score a run by singling, stealing, hit-and-running (is that a word?) became less important when home run hitters could score three and fours runs at a time. And the ability to score more runs than the other team is another factor in drawing crowds, and making money.
Of course Cobb wasn’t playing to lose. But his style of play was no longer competitive. His declaring that it was more exciting was likely his way of saving face. A more gracious man would have acknowledged this.
And I doubt that he really could have competed with Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, etc., in hitting for power. Even if he’d been born 10-15 years earlier.
It’s not as if lots of hitters began clobbering home runs in bunches in the 1920s to emulate Ruth, who outhomered entire teams in those days. Example: Ruth hit 46 home runs in 1924, compared to 22 for the Washington Senators.
The Senators, despite their lack of home run power, won the World Series that year. Excellent pitching i.e. from Walter Johnson counted for a lot. The mediocre Tigers teams managed by Cobb typically were short on pitching.
As a player, Ty Cobb was no more “selfish” than, say, Rod Carew.
When he told people he would hit for power, he set an American League record for most home runs in two games that wasn’t tied for 11 years, and has never been beaten. Then he stopped, feeling he had proved his point. He was 38 at the time. Neither Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, or other power hitters of the era matched it.
You could argue that Cobb was wrong about this; it’s likely he was. But it’s clear that he just didn’t want to hit home runs.
I’m no baseball expert. I enjoy documentaries on the subject. Robinson put up with considerable prejudice from fans and players. He was able to do what earlier stars like John O’Neil, Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson could not.
A number of his teammates on the Montreal Royals and Brooklyn Dodgers had problems, but fans loved it when he batted over .600. Branch Rickey had asked Robinson to have enough guts not to fight back. A number of players in St. Louis had threatened to strike over the issue, and were stopped by the National League. In addition to Slaughter, Dixie Walker, Pee Wee Reese and Coach Ben Chapman were well known opponents but I don’t know if they were acclaimed. I would imagine quite a few successful players would have been opposed, possibly more so if from Southern States…
Ty was temperamental enough to beat up a fan who called him half an N-word. He was known for not having much of a sense of humour. Is this false? This might be exaggerated in documentaries and by biographers, but he was chastised by the League in 1909 and many, many people disliked his aggressive attitude. He.obviously did not play with Robinson, who moved to Brooklyn in late 1945.
Pee Wee Reese was famous for being a Southerner who completely supported Robinson from the beginning. It was Reese who went a long way towards getting others to finally accept Jackie.
Reece is in the Hall of Fame but was obviously the exact opposite for what the OP was seeking.