Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
On this day in 1924: Ty Cobb hits a home run in the first game played at Asheville’s McCormick Field, but the Detroit Tigers lose their exhibition to the Asheville Skylanders, 18-14.
By 1991, when the wooden stadium is razed, to be replaced by concrete, it will be the oldest minor-league park in the country.
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“As idyllic as his days in Royston [Georgia] seemed to be, [young Ty Cobb] was always delighted to visit Grandpa Johnnie, the antislavery Reb, in rural Murphy, North Carolina….
“Once, when he was about 11, he accompanied Johnnie Cobb to Asheville, where the ‘squire’ was serving as foreman of the jury in a civil matter, probably a dispute over land. When the verdict was announced by his grandfather, the loser in the case ran up and grabbed Johnnie by the shirt, an act that caused Ty to also come charging out of the audience and attempt to boot the man in the shins. The angry litigant, unaware of what a pair of Cobb-kicked pants might bring one day on the memorabilia market, swatted him away, but when he turned back to Johnnie Cobb the squire had drawn his pistol. ‘Be on your way,’ Ty’s grandpa said, and the man left peaceably.”
— From “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” by Charles Leerhsen (2015)
“In later years — probably to burnish his image as a hero and spokesman for his sport — [Ty Cobb] and his boosters went out of their way to note that his early encounters with the Negro race were either inconsequential or benign. A 1909 editorial in the Charlotte Observer said, ‘Cobb, born with the prominence that is universal among white persons in Georgia, sought no further prominence by buckshotting his compatriots. So far as is known, he never attended a lynching.’
“Faint praise indeed, but baseball was just as racist as the rest of society…..”
— From “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” by Charles Leerhsen (2015)
John “Buddy” Lewis, onetime Washington Senators slugger, died last week in his native Gastonia.
At 94 Lewis was the 11th oldest living major league baseball player — and the only one whose career had begun before 1936. (Second-oldest: 98-year-old Clarence “Ace” Parker, Duke’s two-sport star.)
Lewis’s chronic weakness was fielding. Before the Senators exiled him from third base to right field, he committed a jaw-dropping 140 errors over four seasons. But at the plate he was a menace from the get-go — at the age of 24 only Ty Cobb had recorded more career hits.
World War II cost Lewis nearly four seasons of his prime. He flew more than 350 cargo missions “over the hump” in India.
After the war he came back strong — starting in the 1947 All-Star game alongside Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio — but retired after the ’49 season to concentrate on his Gastonia Ford dealership.
He seems also to have been the last remaining player to witness Lou Gehrig’s “luckiest man on the face of the earth” farewell speech in 1939.
Depicted: This cheaply made tab-style button from the collection was a candy or gum premium, circa mid 1930s. It’s probably coincidence that the odd, open-mouthed image of Buddy Lewis suggests he’s desperately searching the sky for a pop fly, but….
And here are his baseball cards from 1939 and 1940 and 1941.