By Lee Blessing

What’s Cobb about?

America’s “pastime,” privilege, selective memory, the quest to be best, and justice delayed…

Baseball changed in May 2024 when Negro League statistics were finally and officially added to Major League Baseball’s records. This overdue justice made Josh Gibson the Major League’s career leader with a .372 batting average, surpassing Ty Cobb’s .367.

Lee Blessing’s play, Cobb, written in 1989, doesn’t specifically anticipate this turn of events, but the award-winning playwright does imply that history will be the final judge. Blessing accomplishes this by giving us three Ty Cobbs—at 20, 40 and 70—in dialogue about their shared life.

The elder Cobb is sure he has the “right” memories, the ones that will serve the larger purpose, his own well-deserved place in history, despite his propensity for some serious self-serving nastiness. But, with the unexpected presence of an outsider, an intruder, an “other”—a great player with memories of his own—this may not be the way things go.

Baseball is an American game. Cobb is an American play—with all the uncomfortable complexity American history conjures up and one life may contain.

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