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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Monday, April 11, 2016OTP: ? Ken Burns on Jackie Robinson and the Republican Party’s ‘Pact With the Devil’Airs tonight on PBS.
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: April 11, 2016 at 05:28 PM | 35 comment(s)
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1. bfan Posted: April 12, 2016 at 07:03 AM (#5194353)I'm not sure if these were Norman Mailer's white Negroes, but Jackie attracted some fans who were outsiders. These included Tom Brokaw's high plains drifting father (he had a job, but it was in construction and they had to move a lot around the Dakotas) and a deaf eastern European immigrant from Brooklyn (who didn't care for baseball otherwise) whose son was a Burns interviewee.
A couple of related thoughts.
1.)Integration brought speed back to baseball, although I think that aspect is overstated. Someone brought smallball up during the portion I watched.
2.)I am not that well versed on Negro League history compared to the experts, but I like how it brought high quality baseball to the hinterlands and how the small rosters produced versatile players.
I watched that about a year ago and IIRC, there was a little counterbalance. I got the impression that Stanley Crouch (one of the Burns talking heads) wasn't that much of a fan of Johnson, but I may be misremembering things.
Still paying off, more like.
I thought Leerhsen's book so transparently drove an agenda to rehabilitate Cobb that it lost credibility. In general, I thought it was well-written and it did succeed in part in portraying Cobb as someone more complex than just an angry SOB. But to me it did not thoroughly discredit the traditional image of Cobb as seething tyrant.
I thought Part I was enjoyable if predictable. The debunking of the legend about Reese's hug was interesting, especially Rachel's reaction.
I didn't watch the Burns film last night. I expected "predictable" and seem to have been right from what people were saying, and I wasn't in the mood for predictable …
This is sophistry and you know it. What the SCOTUS has said, it can unsay in a future case. Sanders directly said overturning Citizens United is a litmus test for any justice he would appoint and Clinton said it in a more indirect fashion ("I'll appoint Supreme Court justices who recognize that Citizens United is bad for America.")
It seems hard to blame Burns too much for that, given that he based that take in part on Al Stump's many works about Cobb, and Stump wasn't exposed as a fraud and a fabulist until 2010, well after Burns's documentary completed and was aired.
somebody said (can't remember who) "After watching Burns' baseball documentary, I started to wonder who really won the Civil War"\
it's amazing to me how sloppy he is and rarely gets called on it
There still seems to be some doubt about that. The Union won the fighting part decisively, but the South kept pushing back against Reconstruction, established Jim Crow, and is still fighting against the Civil Rights Act. There was a lot less change and progress than you would expect from winning the war.
Do you think that book has or will change the CW on Cobb? Interesting point in your review about Cobb's rep as the Great Deadball Era player when Lajoie or Wagner could be be better choices and you could make an argument for Speaker's fielding topping Cobb's advantage with the bat and Cobb's baserunning. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some yRoyal Rooters at Nuf Ced McGreevy's bar who argued for Speaker and using the Count The Rings argument.
Does anything like this gets said in the documentary too? I can easily stomach Burns' partisan diarrhea in The Nation but not if #BLM or Willie Horton commentary finds its way into a program that will one day air every few months on MLB Network.
WTF? Pretty good hitter, played on a WS champion, etc.
So he was still incredibly racist, just not an admitted KKK member?
Ty Cobb/Assorted Historical Topics
GGC, Leerhsen mostly talks about Cobb's persona and contemporary fame as being superlative, but he does seem to want to back it up with playing stats. Cobb's stats are obviously great, but I don't think they're stupidly great on the scale of Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds in later eras, and the easy availability of advanced stats now is likely to temper arguments that Cobb was to deadball what Ruth was to lively ball.
I do think that Leerhsen characterizes Cobb's style of play (cerebral, opportunistic) in terms that make sense. He is perhaps a little too willing to take Cobb at his word that Cobb was not a great athlete but won with his smarts. (Pete Rose is fond of that line too.) But that "I never had the physical gifts" rhetoric makes me think of Donald Sutherland lecturing Billy Crudup in Without Limits, ticking Crudup (as Steve Prefontaine) off for not avowing that he just had a better body than other men. Even Leerhsen notes that Cobb was timed going from base to base faster than anyone else in his day, though Cobb disclaimed natural speed.
Jackie Robinson couldn't disavow natural athletic ability, being a national-class track-and-field athlete; but his style was also like Cobb's, uncompromising and on top of every play he was in.
Unlike Robinson, but like Allen Iverson :) Ty Cobb apparently hated practice, and chronically showed up late for spring training.
That's what I've always thought, that the "hug" was a myth. But it's not all that certain that it was.
But more likely, the "hug" took place in 1948.
I'm thankful for him posting the link.
this 4-hour Jackie feature is worth it most of all for the Rachel/Jackie love story in her own words, and for the Trials of Job post-playing career details of Jackie. a lot of that is quite fresh. I skipped the Hollywood movie on the assumption I'd learn nothing; far better this 4 hours than that 90 minutes, I suspect.
"Does anything like this gets said in the documentary too?"
I found the doc to be pretty even-handed politically. Jackie was in a no-win situation in the 1960s, and the talking heads reflected that. It undoubtedly helped keep Burns in check that JR was a Rockefeller Republican, as that brand obviously has aged better from a civil rights standpoint.
Just this morning I read this, which looks to covers the same ground as your link. Wouldn't have killed Burns to not be so strident that the hug never happened.
Did you follow the link to the I’ve Got A Secret segment that featured an appearance by Ty Cobb? BDC was correct in stating the panel could not identify Cobb or his secret, but it was a special episode where they crammed three baseball player secrets into the time normally allotted for one guest and the men were blindfolded (the women weren’t on the assumption that they wouldn’t know anything about baseball).
At any rate, the segment made me smile, and they also featured Leon Cadore, one of the two pitchers in the epic Brooklyn-Boston 26-inning tie game from 1920.
I haven’t watched the documentary yet, so maybe they covered this, but it really wasn’t that anomalous that a black person would be in the Republican Party in the early 60s. Both parties had a wider range of political diversity than today, and the segregated South was still solidly Democratic. Neither party was offering much to blacks, but the Republicans were the “Party of Lincoln” and had the only black U. S. Senator since Reconstruction.
It wasn’t until LBJ pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Nixon formulated his “Southern Strategy” to appeal to disaffected Southern whites that the realignment of the parties started moving towards the alignment we have today. Even with all that, I understand that many Southern blacks agonized about joining the Democratic Party.
I'm not a viewer who is not terribly well versed in American history but the narrative the movie made was that the Rockefeller/Goldwater nomination fight was the turning point for Jackie Robinson and a lot of other blacks. There was a segment about black leaders within the Republican Party being excluded and marginalized at the convention. The impression I got was that there was a significant black presence in the Republican Party, but that 1964 was the beginning of a change.
"Wouldn't have killed Burns to not be so strident that the hug never happened."
Rachel said it didn't happen, and if you spend time around her, you believe her. ideally, Burns would not let his fondness for her and his gratitude for the extraordinary amount of revelations she offered about her marital history impact his editorial judgment, but I am not surprised if it did.
incidentally, Rachel at one point notes that they were so joined at the hip that whenever he played golf, she rode in the cart with him for all 18 holes.
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