A writer named Charles Leerhsen (former editor for Sports Illustrated, among other publications) has published a biography "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty." In it, he makes a strong case that the stories of Cobb's despicability appear to be grossly exaggerated and not corroborated by contemporaneous evidence. He places a good bit of the blame on Al Stump, the ghostwriter of Cobb's autobiography, who had a sensationalist reputation to begin with and spent very little time with Cobb in the writing process. In particular, the charges of Cobb as an extreme racist may not stand up under research. Here is a link to a an article by the author about his book:
http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-was-ty...ats-wrong/

The NYT review says the book is interesting, if far from great:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/books/...rhsen.html

It is often the case that career journalistic editors don't always make good book-length writers. A noteworthy example is longtime Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who wrote a pretty good biography of Andrew Jackson in 2009 and then cashed in on that celebrity by cranking out a very poorly written book on Thomas Jefferson a few years later; the latter book was a painfully sloppy read, as if no editor had ever looked at it before it was printed.

Racism was a lot more prevalent a century ago than it is now or in recent memory. I saw the movie 42 about Jackie Robinson in 1947 and thought that what Chapman said was mild compared to some of what I heard prior to desegregation.