Youngstown native Cobbin lectures on Negro League baseball

February 24, 2016 at 12:09a.m.

By JOHN BASSETTi

YOUNGSTOWN

Although a bit reluctant to give his age to a stranger, W. James Cobbin relinquished and acquiesced.

If not, flip to the backside of his Yesterday’s Baseball card and read: Dec. 27, 1934, in Montgomery, Alabama.

Cobbin is trying to perpetuate the Negro League history and he was living proof during his presentation: “Leadership and Legacy: The Significance of Athletics and the Negro Baseball League” at the Tyler History Center Tuesday evening. Cobbin is CEO of Inter-City Transit, the former CCS Transportation.

Especially during Black History month, Cobbin — who grew up in Youngstown — makes an effort to talk to groups.

“It’s a league nobody wrote about,” he said. “It’s one of those things they wanted to sweep under the rug and all that great history will never be known. There’s great ballplayers, hall of fame ballplayers whose names people will never know.”

A few are easily recognizable, such as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell, while Jackie Robinson is synonymous with breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947.

“The Negro League played the white major league all-stars [in exhibitions] in times when they couldn’t play together,” Cobbin said. “Because of that, there’s a lot of Negro League players in Cooperstown who never played in the white major leagues. But [white] players knew they [Negro League players] were superior talent.”

In fact, Bob Feller, in his acceptance speech for Cooperstown, said he wasn’t worthy of that designation if a guy like Paige wasn’t considered.

“That started the whole thing rolling,” Cobbin said, citing similar testimony from other players in that era, such as Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and their experiences against Negro League talent.

Cobbin boasts saying that Paige and Larry Doby joined Cleveland in 1948, when Paige was named Rookie of the Year in his late 40s.

“Cleveland won the pennant and World Series in 1948 and they haven’t won it since. That shows that he still had talent, so you could image what he was like in his prime.”

After that, Cobbin said, teams started getting the cream of the crop from the Negro League, a trend that eventually destroyed the Negro League.

Like most of the 50 to 60 remaining Negro League alumni, the main objective of the 81-year-old Cobbin, who played for the Black Yankees and Indianapolis Clowns in 1956 and 1957 is to educate today’s generation as well as raise funds for forgotten and pension-less players. He said that Yesterday’s Professional Negro League Baseball foundation, started in 1996, serves to help those players.

“They didn’t have money to bury themselves and that is one of the tragedies of this league,” said Cobbin, who explained that although 150-or-so teams passed through the original Negro League only a dozen endured over the years.

Further, he said the African-American players who followed and made millions didn’t see fit to cut some for those old guys.

“I guess they had their own minds of what they should or shouldn’t do,” Cobbin said.

He continued: “The legacy — the history — of the Negro League needs to be told and perpetuated. Our focus is hoping that it doesn’t die.”

He said that the movie “42” of Jackie Robinson’s life was “the most accurate film ever made [as far as Negro League players is concerned]. The rest were movies.”

Although tempered, Cobbin wasn’t short on tales of discrimination, whether along bus rides to games through the South or during his playing days in the Army in Europe.

When he first signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates and was shipped to Brunswick, Ga., for spring training, Cobbin and another black player, Reggie, thought their dream had come true. Then, after reality set in, the white players enjoyed hotel hospitality while he and Reggie were the guests of a black gentleman in the community.

“We had to bathe in a zinc tub,” Cobbin said.

When the general manager of the Black Yankees came along, Cobbin and his teammate gained their release from Pittsburgh and joined the Black Yankees’ spring training camp in Tampa, Fla.

“That’s how my Negro League career started,” he said.

An interesting sidelight is Cobbin’s Army days with Elvis Presley.

“We were in basic training together in Fort Hood, Texas,” he said. “At that time, he was just another guy as far as I was concerned. As he got real popular, then he became somebody.”

Cobbin said that the bus trips around the eastern part of the country may have been the start of what grew into his livelihood today.

“Our chauffeur took several days to get to a destination, so the team paid me to drive to get there sooner,” he said.