Facebook groups lashed out after Ty Cobb lost the MLB career batting average record.
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"I'm really disgusted with the way people are receiving this," Cobb said. "It just isn't who we are as a family."
Cindy Cobb was kicked out of her own facebook group for defending Negro Leagues decision
The backlash from Major League Baseball's announcement last week that it was absorbing Negro League statistics into the game's official historical record was almost immediate in a Facebook fan group that Cindy Cobb helped nurture.
Cobb, 67, is the granddaughter of Ty Cobb, the baseball legend and lifetime .367 hitter who is displaced in the new record book as MLB's career batting average champion by Negro League great Josh Gibson, who hit .372 for his 16-year career. Gibson is also MLB's new leader in on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) and slugging percentage, replacing Babe Ruth. The changes were more than many people in the 2,600-plus member Official Ty Cobb Fan Group could abide. They railed against them in their private Facebook fan group, Cobb said. The critics argued that Negro League statistics were unreliable, their stars played fewer games and went up against inferior competition.
"This action is by far the most drunken farce that I have ever witnessed in professional sports," a person identified as Wesley Fricks, a self-described Ty Cobb historian who controls the fan page (recently renamed Official Ty Cobb Legacy Group), posted on Ty Cobb Athenium, another Cobb fan page, shortly after the MLB announcement.
Cindy Cobb fought back, arguing in her posts that her grandfather, who was in the Hall of Fame's inaugural 1936 class, would have embraced the changes. She added that it was undeniable that ballplayers from the Negro Leagues enjoyed few of the privileges afforded her grandfather. For that, Cobb asserted, she was kicked out of the group on June 1 -- three days after the MLB announcement.
The swift, negative reaction on social media underscored the unwillingness of some fans to recognize updated statistics as one way of righting the segregationist wrongs of the past. Whether they are representative of a larger segment of society remains unclear, but the fact that they were so willing to state their views openly -- and retaliate against someone offering an opposing view -- suggests there is lots more work to be done.
Cindy Cobb neglected to make copies of her posts but did manage a screenshot of one of the sharp responses she received.
"So, some nitwit loser who was willing to support giving away Cobb's hard-earned titles due to Wokeness, got the boot," wrote one member. "Good riddance."
The fan group's postings are closed to outsiders, so there was no way to know which way the conversation went after she was blocked.
Cobb, who lives in New York state, said she was left wounded by the reaction. "I made a post speaking to the inequities of the past, saying that because my grandfather was a white man playing in the MLB, he had opportunities that Black men did not have," she said in a phone interview. "Then I was harassed and verbally abused."