Ty Cobb

Baseball Player

• Born: December 18, 1886
• Place of Birth: Narrows, Georgia
• Died: July 17, 1961
• Place of Death: Atlanta, Georgia

Ty Cobb’s aggressive and inventive style of play in baseball enabled him to set records in almost every phase of the game in the early twentieth century. Many historians and sports fans consider him among the greatest baseball players of all time, although reports of his difficult personality also became legendary.

Early Life

Ty Cobb, born in Narrows, Georgia, in 1886, was proud of his Southern heritage and his family. His father was a teacher and a landowner, and an ancestor had been a Civil War general who died at the Battle of Fredricksburg. Cobb even claimed George Washington as a distant ancestor.

Cobb’s father wanted him to attend college or, perhaps, to win an appointment to West Point, but the young Cobb was determined to be a baseball player. He saw baseball as a career in which he might excel while he could not hope to compete with his father’s record in academic studies. Baseball players were not, however, socially accepted at the time; even some of the greatest ballplayers were not admitted to many hotels or restaurants. Cobb, however, had a burning desire to prove himself, so his father gave him six fifteen-dollar checks and sent him off to join the minor league team in Augusta.

Cobb played for Augusta for only a few games before he was released because a veteran had returned to the team. Cobb did, however, manage to catch on with a club in Anniston, Alabama, and he performed so well that he was sent back to Augusta. His batting average was only .237 for Augusta in the 1904 season, but he impressed everyone with his aggressive style of play.

Cobb began to become the Ty Cobb known to history while at Augusta. His new manager, George Leidy, worked with him every day on his hitting, running, and fielding. Cobb was not a natural ballplayer as Babe Ruth and Shoeless Joe Jackson were; he had to learn to hit and to take advantage of the weaknesses of others on the base paths or in the batter’s box. In addition, he was not very tall or large. He stood only five feet ten inches tall and weighed about 155 pounds at the time, but he compensated for his size with desire for excellence and dedication to the game.

Life’s Work

In 1905 Cobb was signed by the Detroit Tigers of the American League, one of the two professional leagues that formed Major League Baseball (MLB). He had a mediocre rookie year in the major leagues, playing center field for forty-two games and batting a meager .238 (according to the MLB's official records; some other sources vary slightly on statistics from this era). In addition, he had a serious conflict with many of the established veterans on the Tigers. Some of those involved later called the treatment Cobb received normal rookie hazing, but Cobb took it personally. He thought there was a clique of players who wanted to drive him off the team. In his typical fashion, Cobb fought back against the veterans and, in so doing, may have made the problem worse. He challenged any or all of the contentious veterans to a fight and almost got himself traded because of the dissension on the team.

Cobb claimed that he benefited from his trouble with the veterans. Since he was isolated, he did not have an opportunity to waste his time at shows or pool halls but could use that time improving his base-running and hitting skills. He hit .316 and stole twenty-three bases in his second year with the Tigers.

The 1907 season was even more successful for Cobb and the Tigers. He hit .350 to lead the league in batting average for the first time, and the Tigers won their first pennant. Detroit lost the World Series to the Chicago Cubs in four straight games, however, and Cobb only hit .200 in the championship. On the other hand, the feud between him and the veterans ended, although Cobb was never popular with the players on his team and was hated by many players and fans in other American League cities, especially Philadelphia. The reasons for this conflict and dislike were rooted in Cobb's notably aggressive style of play. He tried to take advantage of every situation with which he was confronted, whether it was a catcher’s arm, a pitcher’s attention, an infielder’s position, or a sportswriter’s influence. This aggressiveness and combativeness carried over to his relationships with his teammates and opponents. He was widely considered not pleasant or sociable but a loner with an obsession to excel and to take advantage of less dedicated players. Most of Cobb’s autobiography is a defense of his side of the many fights and quarrels he got into. He never gave an inch and retaliated when he thought he had been wronged, and it did not take much to make him believe that someone had wronged him.

In 1908, Cobb held out for a salary of $5,000, the first of many holdouts throughout his career. He did not trust team ownership and tried to get whatever he could out of the recalcitrant boss. Cobb was determined that no one was going to get the best of him on the field or off it. He won his second straight batting championship that year, while leading the league in several other statistical categories as well. The Tigers also won the pennant again, but they lost the World Series once more to the Cubs.

Cobb won his third straight batting title in 1909, also leading the league in runs batted in (RBIs) and home runs for a so-called Triple Crown performance, and the Tigers won their third straight pennant. In the World Series with the Pittsburgh Pirates, it was rumored that Cobb had a personal duel with the great shortstop of the Pirates, Honus Wagner. Cobb was quoted as saying “I’ll show that Kraut,” and some said he threatened to injure Wagner with his cleated shoes (spiking) when running the bases. Cobb denied making such threats, but the public both expected and believed that Cobb would spike the popular Wagner. Cobb did not have a strong series, however, and the Tigers lost again. Cobb was never to play on a winning World Series team and would not be on another pennant winner for the rest of his career.

Cobb’s performance continued to be superior over the next fifteen years. He won nine straight batting championships from 1907 to 1915, with a personal high of .420 in 1911. He stole a record high of ninety-six bases in 1915. These records remained individual achievements, however, since the Tigers could not win another pennant. Meanwhile, controversy continued to follow Cobb. He was accused of spiking the very popular Frank “Home Run” Baker, thus unleashing the wrath of the Philadelphia fans. He beat up Buck Herzog in a fight in his hotel room and got into a brawl with an umpire, Billy Evans, under the stands. Cobb claimed that he was merely acting in self-defense, but his playing style and attitude seemed to invite trouble.

Cobb won his last batting title in 1919, giving him a record total of eleven (some sources say twelve, due to controversial results in 1910). In 1921, after a dismal finish for the Tigers, Cobb was offered the position of player-manager. He accepted, although he claimed that the job was forced on him. Cobb certainly was an unlikely candidate for the manager’s job since he was baseball’s supreme example of a loner who seemed more interested in individual than team records. One reason Cobb was offered the job was the sudden popularity of Babe Ruth as a home-run hitter. Apparently, the Detroit management hoped to increase the fans’ interest by making Cobb more visible and more powerful. Cobb spent four years as manager of the Tigers, but under his tenure, the team still never won a pennant. In his autobiography, Cobb claimed that the reason the Tigers did not win was that the management refused to buy or trade for the players he believed were needed.

In 1926, Cobb was suddenly released by the Tigers because of a betting scandal. The charge was that Cobb and Cleveland Indians star Tris Speaker, who was also subsequently released by his team, conspired to fix a game between their clubs and then bet on it. Cobb claimed that it was only a rumor started by a player he had released from the team, and the charges were never proved, but Cobb's reputation was tarnished. He joined the Philadelphia A’s for his last two years as a baseball player.

Once Cobb ended his career as a ballplayer after the 1928 season, he never had another job in organized baseball. He was, by this time, wealthy from his investments, especially those he made in Coca-Cola. Cobb married twice and divorced twice, and he was reportedly not very close to his five children. He died in 1961 at the age of seventy-four.

Significance

There is little doubt that Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, a judgment certified by his inclusion in the first class inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. He set numerous batting records, some of which remain standing. (Notably, however, his .367 career batting average, long considered untouchable, fell to second place behind Josh Gibson's .372 after Negro Leagues statistics were officially added to MLB records in 2024.) Cobb remains an icon of baseball's early glory days.

In addition to his elite statistics, Cobb is also famous (or infamous) for his difficult personal reputation, which has itself become part of baseball lore. Yet while he was certainly never as widely beloved as other stars like Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio, and was known for his penchant for fighting, historians have questioned the extent to which he is often imagined as a villain. Some of that image came from his own autobiography, My Life In Baseball, which was released soon after his death in 1961 despite Cobb's disapproval of ghostwriter Al Stump's work. Stump then also went on to publish other articles that greatly sensationalized Cobb's reputation as a violent and bitter person, while a 1984 biography of Cobb by Charles C. Alexander added suggestions that the famed player was racist. However, later research showed that most of these claims were not supported by verified evidence. For example, far from being a documented virulent racist, Cobb actually spoke in strong favor of Black players in the major leagues.

Bibliography

Alexander, Charles C. Ty Cobb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Appel, Marin, and Burt Goldblatt. Baseball’s Best: The Hall of Fame Gallery. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.

Bak, Richard. Peach: Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Sports Media Group, 2005.

Castrovince, Anthony. "15 Ty Cobb Facts Baseball Fans Should Know." MLB, 18 Dec. 2022, www.mlb.com/news/ty-cobb-amazing-facts-and-stats. Accessed 28 June 2024.

Cobb, Ty, with Al Stump. My Life in Baseball: The True Record. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961.

Holmes, Dan. Ty Cobb: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Leerhsen, Charles. Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty. Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Ritter, Lawrence S. The Glory of Their Times. New York: Collier Books, 1966.

Stump, Al. “Ty Cobb’s Wild Ten-Month Fight to Live.” In The Baseball Reader, edited by Charles Einstein. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1980.

"Ty Cobb." Baseball Reference, www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/cobbty01.shtml. Accessed 1 July 2024.

"Ty Cobb." National Baseball Hall of Fame, baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/cobb-ty. Accessed 28 June 2024.