Posted: 25 Feb
2015 06:55 PM PST
Hey baseball fans!
Today I have a special interview! It's with the Hall of Famer who has the best lifetime batting average of all time (.366), Ty Cobb! But wait: Ty Cobb has been dead since 1961, so how could I have possibly interviewed him? Good question. Remember my "interviews" with Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth, where I asked someone who knew a lot about one of the hitters to answer questions as if he was him? Well, I did the same thing with this interview. The person who answered my questions as if he was Cobb is Norm Coleman, an actor who actually plays Ty Cobb on stage for the past eight years in the play "Tyrus Cobb." Norm's answers were awesome and I think they sound exactly like how Cobb himself would answer the questions.
The real Ty Cobb below:
Today I have a special interview! It's with the Hall of Famer who has the best lifetime batting average of all time (.366), Ty Cobb! But wait: Ty Cobb has been dead since 1961, so how could I have possibly interviewed him? Good question. Remember my "interviews" with Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth, where I asked someone who knew a lot about one of the hitters to answer questions as if he was him? Well, I did the same thing with this interview. The person who answered my questions as if he was Cobb is Norm Coleman, an actor who actually plays Ty Cobb on stage for the past eight years in the play "Tyrus Cobb." Norm's answers were awesome and I think they sound exactly like how Cobb himself would answer the questions.
The real Ty Cobb below:
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| Ty Cobb |
But before I present the interview, click here http://baseballwithmatt.blogspot.com/ . The link
will actually take you to where you can buy my book, "Amazing Aaron to
Zero Zippers: An Introduction to Baseball History, " which I highly
recommend. If you flip to chapter three in the book, you will see a whole
section on "Cantankerous (meaning argumentative) Cobb." Hope you find
the biography interesting. Anyway, let's get to the interview.
Matt: You faced a lot of tough pitchers during your playing days, but who was the toughest to hit against?
Ty: The two most difficult pitchers for me to handle were Babe Ruth when he pitched for Boston and Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators. Both entered the Hall of Fame with me in 1936. The Babe threw only two pitches, fastball, up high and in tight, and a curve, low and away. You knew they were coming and sometimes he’d yell at me, telling me what was coming. He dared you to hit it and if you got a hit, he’d scream at me, "You got lucky Ty."
Matt: You faced a lot of tough pitchers during your playing days, but who was the toughest to hit against?
Ty: The two most difficult pitchers for me to handle were Babe Ruth when he pitched for Boston and Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators. Both entered the Hall of Fame with me in 1936. The Babe threw only two pitches, fastball, up high and in tight, and a curve, low and away. You knew they were coming and sometimes he’d yell at me, telling me what was coming. He dared you to hit it and if you got a hit, he’d scream at me, "You got lucky Ty."
I went 22 for 67 with a batting average of .328
against George. No one threw faster than Walter Johnson. If they had radar guns
back then, his fastball would clock near 100 mph. Johnson feared hitting a
batter, afraid he might kill him if he hit the batter in the head. So I would
step in closer to the plate, making Walter throw a little outside, making it a
little easier for me to hit the ball to left and get 120 hits in 328 at-bats for
an average of .366.
Every hitter has one guy he can’t hit. For me, there was a
little fellow named Bill Bayne (pictured below), pitched
for the St. Louis Browns between 1919 and 1924. I faced him 36 times and got
only 5 hits, which was a batting average of .139. I never could figure him out.
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