Art Miley has a gem. At an old timer’s game at Detroit\u2019s Briggs Stadium in 1958, the avid baseball fan spotted an elderly Ty Cobb, one of the first five Major League players inducted into Cooperstown\u2019s Hall of Fame, and asked him for an autograph.
\nHe still has it, neatly protected in a plastic sleeve inside a manila envelope, in pencil. An appraiser gave him an unofficial estimate of $200 to $300 in the \u201870s.
\n“She told me that if it had been in green ink, it would have been worth a lot more,” says Miley, a long-time resident of La Jolla and a former publisher whose children all attended La Jolla schools. “Ty Cobb liked to sign autographs in green ink.”
\nThe hand-scrawled script is penciled on an insert from the program that Miley bought at the game. On the half-sheet of paper are printed the names of former players participating in the old timer’s game, including San Diego\u2019s own Bobby Doerr, a second baseman, and Hall of Famers Hal Newhouser, a pitcher, and Joe Cronin, who became an American League president. Doerr, like Ted Williams, graduated from Hoover High School.
\nInformed that Cobb\u2019s reputation, which had been maligned for decades by a sportswriter who fabricated stories of the white native Georgian uttering racist epithets and brutally assaulting a black man due to his race, was rehabilitated recently by a researcher who investigated the stories, Miley expressed surprise and pleasure. The author is Charles Leerhsen, and his new biography of Cobb, published in 2015, is titled “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty.” The book debunks incidents made up by Al Stump, a sportswriter, in a now-discredited 1961 supposed autobiography.
\nIt\u2019s not every day that one has an autograph from a player who entered the Hall with a .367 lifetime batting average and the career record for stolen bases, which was later broken by Rickey Henderson.
\nThe native of Petersburg, Ind, population 3,000, has more baseball stories up his sleeve. “As a teenager, I hitchhiked a hundred miles or so from my hometown to St. Louis to watch the St. Louis Cardinals,” reminisces the former book man. “I went to games at old Sportsman\u2019s Park in St. Louis (an all-wood stadium that is still standing, but which is left unused).
\n“At the end of one summer, I attended Cardinal doubleheaders three days in a row, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, over the three-day Labor Day weekend.”
\nArt also proudly reports that he attended the Major League All-Star Game in 1948, played at Sportsman\u2019s, where Stan “the Man” Musial ruled the outfield for two decades.
\nWith his wife Babs, also a baseball enthusiast, the two inform a listener that their two small hometowns, Babs hails from Vincennes, not far from Petersburg, sit smack-dab pretty much equidistant from St. Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati, mentioned in addition to the Cardinals, the Cubs and Reds.
\nWhen the listener points out they left out the Chicago White Sox, Babs replies aptly, “We have always been National League fans. The National League is better,” indicating with her palm a cut above.
\nBabs, with a twinkle in her eye, also shares a high school confidential. “When the young men in St. Petersburg were hanging out for spring training, they talked about where to find the prettiest girls,” she says. “Someone said, \u2018Oh, go to Vincennes. They raise the prettiest girls.\u2019”
\nArt, ever the historian, whether of baseball or wider subjects, mentions with a bit of wonder that there was no Major League team located further west than St. Louis until the Philadelphia A\u2019s moved their franchise to Kansas City, at the other end of the state of Missouri, in 1955.
\nAfter getting married, the couple lived in St. Louis, where Art secured work. The two attended games at Sportsman\u2019s Park, which was the Cardinals\u2019 park from the 1880\u2019s until 1966, when the \u201860s-style Busch Memorial Stadium was erected by the owners, who owned the brewery.
\nThat park, Sportsman\u2019s, was the scene of many historical baseball exploits, including the success of the famed Gas House Gang, a group of Cardinal players with verve including Hall-of-Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean and others.
\nBeing situated in a city with accompanying racial attitudes at that tim, which the Mileys didn\u2019t subscribe to, at all, the ballpark was also the site of heavily segregated seating in the stands, with African-Americans relegated to the outfield bleachers. Art remembers that after the Dodgers\u2019 Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, “Many more African-Americans attended games after that.”
\nIn fact, Art became enamored of the far away Brooklyn Dodgers at one point in his life, admiring and naming in recollection “\u2018Campy\u2019 (Roy Campanella) catching, (captain) Pee Wee (Reese) at short, Jackie (Robinson) at second, Duke Snider in center, Don Drysdale, just starting out, on the mound.”
\nBabs, equipped with her cane, has attended Padres games in the last few years, negotiating the higher reaches of Petco Park with its many steps accompanied by friends.
\nThe two have passed on their love of baseball and sports in general to their children and grandchildren, some of whom intensely follow different teams. One of their grandchildren, Erin, is employed by the Padres.
\nArt tells a humorous story with a smile. “When a friend who works for the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) was visiting from the East, it was mentioned to our granddaughter,” he relates. “She reacted, \u2018Why didn\u2019t you tell me? You know how much I want to work in sports!\u2019 She heard \u2018SEC\u2019 and immediately thought it was the Southeast Conference in the NCAA. She goes from one to whatever number in a few seconds on sports.”
\nRegarding who gets the Ty Cobb autograph when it is handed down, Art hasn\u2019t decided that. Otherwise, it would be quite a catfight in a baseball- and sports-crazy family.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Art Miley has a gem. At an old timer’s game at Detroit\u2019s Briggs Stadium in 1958, the avid baseball fan spotted an elderly Ty Cobb, one of the first five Major League players inducted into Cooperstown\u2019s Hall of Fame, and asked him for an autograph. He still has it, neatly protected in a plastic sleeve […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":266851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11556","_seopress_titles_title":"Art Miley gets some mileage out of Ty Cobb autograph","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11556,12360,11551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-downtown-news","category-duplicate","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}