I misremembered the documentary and apologize. You are correct, Reese was a Southener who refused to sign a petition other players had circulated against Robinson, stating that if he was good enough to take his job then he was entitled to it, or something like that.
Cobb’s PERSONAL style of play will always be competitive, because he was insanely great. Cobb hit .366 with a career .512 slugging percentage. If he put up the same numbers today, even hitting just seven or eight homers all year, he’d be one of the greatest players in the sport. His CAREER on base percentage was higher than any individual has just for the 2022 season. If everyone on your 2022 team hit like Ty Cobb you’d have the greatest offensive team ever assembled.
Was Cobb saying exactly that, or was he pointing out that playing to win involved more than just swinging for the fences. Over the course of a season there will be plenty of games won in the fraction of difference between a runner touching home before the catcher touches him with the ball. An inch or less can be the difference between an out and a line drive into the outfield. The well calculated lead by a runner, bunting, squeezes, add up to runs, and in a successful season the most important runs that come post-season where the basics of baseball collide between the top teams in the game. When Billy Martin brought small ball back to the stinking Yankees in the 80s it took them right back to the top. To Cobb, the excitement and thrill of the competition may have been more than satisfy to himself or the crowds, he might have been considering how it makes the whole team better.
This gets a bit confusing because Martin had so many tenures there, but he certainly didn’t get them back to the top; they never made the playoffs with Martin as manager in the 1980s.
He managed them in 1983; they finished third, 91-71. They weren’t at all a small ball team.
He took them over three weeks into 1985 and they played really well but came up just short, 98-64. Not really a small ball team - they did steal a lot of bases, but they had Rickey Henderson, who was pretty much his own strategy and was more than half the team’s steals. They didn’t bunt a lot or anything like that.
He managed them again until about mid June 1988, then was fired for some reason. Again, not a small ball team.
In 1910, when he was locked in a close race for the AL batting title with Napoleon Lajoie of Cleveland, he sat out the final two games of the season to preserve his .385 average. The manager of the St. Louis Browns, who hated Cobb, ordered his third-baseman to play on the verge of the outfield, to allow Lajoie to dump bunt singles up the line. He went 8-for-8 and won the title (later revoked for the obvious cheating).
But when the news first broke, Lajoie got a congratulatory telegram - from Cobb’s Tiger teammates.
Eight of them, anyway.
Later, his teammates would decide to go on strike to protest Cobb’s suspension for going into the stands after a harassing fan.