Art Miley has a gem. At an old timer’s game at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium in 1958, the avid baseball fan spotted an elderly Ty Cobb, one of the first five Major League players inducted into Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame, and asked him for an autograph.
He 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 ‘70s.
“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.”
The 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’s 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.
Informed that Cobb’s 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.
It’s 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.
The 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’s Park in St. Louis (an all-wood stadium that is still standing, but which is left unused).
“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.”
Art also proudly reports that he attended the Major League All-Star Game in 1948, played at Sportsman’s, where Stan “the Man” Musial ruled the outfield for two decades.
With 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.
When 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.
Babs, 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, ‘Oh, go to Vincennes. They raise the prettiest girls.’”
Art, 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’s moved their franchise to Kansas City, at the other end of the state of Missouri, in 1955.
After getting married, the couple lived in St. Louis, where Art secured work. The two attended games at Sportsman’s Park, which was the Cardinals’ park from the 1880’s until 1966, when the ‘60s-style Busch Memorial Stadium was erected by the owners, who owned the brewery.
That park, Sportsman’s, 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.
Being situated in a city with accompanying racial attitudes at that tim, which the Mileys didn’t 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’ Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, “Many more African-Americans attended games after that.”
In fact, Art became enamored of the far away Brooklyn Dodgers at one point in his life, admiring and naming in recollection “‘Campy’ (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.”
Babs, 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.
The 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.
Art 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, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You know how much I want to work in sports!’ She heard ‘SEC’ and immediately thought it was the Southeast Conference in the NCAA. She goes from one to whatever number in a few seconds on sports.”
Regarding who gets the Ty Cobb autograph when it is handed down, Art hasn’t decided that. Otherwise, it would be quite a catfight in a baseball- and sports-crazy family.