Hello and welcome to this throwback episode of Our Fake History.

This week I am throwing you back to season one and episode number 24, did Ty Cobb kill a guy?

In this episode, we explore the difficult, some might say, monstrous legacy of the turn-of-the-century baseball legend Ty Cobb.

Now, this episode originally dropped on July 4th, 2016, and my, oh my, has the world

changed since July 4th, 2016. I think this episode captures an interesting moment in the conversation that we were having about problematic historical figures.

This episode came out before the Me Too movement.

It came out before the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

It came out before we were reevaluating the legacies of many

historical figures in the wake of all the revelations we had seen about high-profile people

living in our society right now. It's been a wild nine years. I think we can all agree. With that in mind, this episode has a certain

naivete about it. In this episode, you'll hear me talk about racism, hate crimes, and all sorts of

violence with a certain lightness that I'm not sure I would bring to it today.

In the end, though, I stand by my thesis at the heart of this episode, which is that difficult,

even loathsome people need to be understood with a certain degree of nuance. I truly believe that no one is

all good or all bad. Now, that doesn't mean we should let people off the hook or even forgive people

for particularly nasty things that they have done over the course of their lives. But human lives are complicated and that should never be forgotten.

Listening back, I found myself freshly annoyed by the sports writer Al Stump,

who invented many of the worst slanders about Ty Cobb.

Stump was a charlatan and an opportunist who profited off of the

monstrous reputation he created for Ty Cobb. He has done a disservice to history because now

it's harder than ever to get to the heart of who the real

Ty Cobb was. If Ty Cobb ultimately deserves to be condemned by the opinion of history,

...