Ty Cobb

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**Tyrus Raymond Cobb**
Personal Info

Birth	December 18, 1886, Narrows, Georgia
Death:	July 17, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia
Professional Career
Debut	August 30, 1905, Detroit Tigers vs. New York Highlanders, Bennett Park
Team(s)	As Player Detroit Tigers (1905 - 1926) Philadelphia A's (1927 - 1928) As Manager Detroit Tigers (1921 - 1926)
HOF induction:	1936
Career Highlights
All-Time Records Career batting average (.366) Career steals of home (54) Career batting titles (11) Notable Achievements Batted over .320 for 22 straight seasons Batted over .400 three times (1911, 1912 & 1922) Won the Triple Crown in 1909 One of the inaugural members of the Hall of Fame

Member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame

Tyrus "Ty" Cobb
"The Georgia Peach"
Inducted as a member of the Detroit Tigers (None)
Year Inducted: 1936
First Year Elligible: 1936

Tyrus Raymond "Ty" Cobb (December 18, 1886 – July 17, 1961), nicknamed "The Georgia Peach", was a Hall of Fame baseball player. When he retired in 1928, he was the holder of ninety major league records.^{[citation needed]} Cobb also received the most votes of any player on the 1936 inaugural Hall of Fame Ballot.[2]

1 Early life & baseball career
2 Major League Career
3 Post professional career
4 Regular season stats
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Early life & baseball career

Ty Cobb was born in Narrows, Georgia as the first of three children to Amanda Chitwood Cobb and William Herschel Cobb.

Ty spent his first years in baseball as a member of the Royston Rompers, the semi-pro Royston Red, and the Augusta Tourists of the Sally League. He then went to try out for the Anniston Steelers of the a semi-pro of the Tennessee-Alabama League.

After about three months, Ty returned to the Tourists. He finished the season hitting .237 in 35 games. Cobb also started the 1905 with the Tourists.

August 1905 was an eventful month for Ty. The Tourists' management sold Cobb to the American League's Detroit Tigers.^[1]. Additionally, On August 8 1905, Ty's father was shot to death by Ty's mother.

[edit] Major League Career

[edit] The early years

Three weeks after his mother killed his father, Cobb played center field for the Detroit Tigers. On August 30 1905, in his first major league at-bat, Cobb doubled off the New York Highlanders's Jack Chesbro. That season, Cobb managed to bat only .240 in 41 games. Nevertheless, he showed enough promise as a rookie for the Tigers to give him a lucrative $1,500 contract for 1906.

Cobb signs a $5000 contract for 1908 after a bitter holdout.

The following year (1906) he became the Tigers' full-time center fielder and hit .316 in 98 games. He would never hit below that mark again. Cobb, firmly entrenched in center field, led the Tigers to three consecutive American League Pennants from 1907-1909. They would lose all three match-ups.

In one notable 1907 game, Cobb reached first, stole second, stole third, and then stole home on consecutive attempts. He finished that season with a league high .350 batting average, 212 hits, 49 steals and 119 RBI. In September 1907, Cobb began a relationship with The Coca-Cola Company that would last the remainder of his entire life. By the time he died, he owned three bottling plants, in Santa Maria, California; Twin Falls, Idaho; and Bend, Oregon; and owned over 20,000 shares of stock. He was also a celebrity spokesman for the product; one Cobb endorsement claimed, "I always find that a drink of Coca-Cola between the games refreshes me to such an extent that I can start the second game feeling as if I had not been exercising at all, in spite of my exertions in the first."^[2]

The following season, the Tigers bested the Chicago White Sox for the pennant. Cobb again won the batting title, although he hit "only" .324 that year. Despite another loss in the Series, Cobb had something to celebrate. In August 1908 he married Charlotte "Charlie" Marion Lombard, the daughter of prominent Augustan Roswell Lombard.

The Tigers won the American League pennant again in 1909. During the Series Cobb stole home in the second game, igniting a three-run rally, but that was the high point for Cobb. He ended batting a lowly .231 in his last World Series, as the Tigers lost in seven games. Although he performed poorly in the postseason, Cobb won the Triple Crown by hitting .377 with 107 RBI and nine home runs - all inside-the-park.

[edit] 1910 & the Chalmers Award controversy

Cobb and Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie

In 1910, Cobb and Nap Lajoie were neck-and-neck for the American League batting title. Cobb was ahead by a slight margin going into the last day of the season. The prize for the winner of the title was a Chalmers Automobile. Cobb sat out the game to preserve his average. Lajoie, whose team was playing the St. Louis Browns, notched seven hits in a doubleheader to pass Cobb. Six of those hits were bunt singles that fell in front of the third baseman. It turned out that Browns manager, Jack O'Connor, had ordered third baseman Red Corriden to play deep, on the outfield grass, so as to allow the popular Lajoie to win the title. AL president Ban Johnson declared Cobb the official batting average winner after some wrangling. The Chalmers people, however, decided to award an automobile to both Cobb and Lajoie. The next year, the Chalmers Award was given to the player "most valuable" to his team, and the modern Most Valuable Player Award was born, with Cobb winning the American League version unanimously.

Muddying the waters further, it is the 1910 season which accounts for the statistical discrepancy in Cobb's career hit total, which was long reported as 4,191. A Detroit Tigers box score was mistakenly counted twice in the season-ending calculations, thus giving Cobb an extra 2-for-3. Beyond awarding him two nonexistent hits, it also raised Cobb's 1910 batting average from .383 to .385. Lajoie is credited with a .384 average for the 1910 season, and thus the downwardly revised figure would also cost Cobb one of his 12 batting titles. With the Browns deliberately helping an opponent to surpass a total which was unknowingly inaccurate, the ensuing mathematical mess was described by one writer, "It could be said that 1910 produced two bogus leading batting averages, and one questionable champion." ^[3]

[edit] The 1911 Season & Onward

Ty Cobb and Joe Jackson in Cleveland

Cobb was having an noteable year in 1911, which included a 40-game hitting streak. Toward the end of the season, ”Shoeless” Joe Jackson had a .009 point lead on him in batting average. However, Joe Jackson finished with a final average of .408, while Cobb finished with a .420 average. This was in addition to 248 hits, 147 runs scored, 127 RBI, 83 stolen bases, and the league lead in doubles, triples, and slugging average. The only major offensive category which Cobb did not lead in was home runs, where Frank Baker surpassed him 11-8. Cobb's dominance at the plate is suggested by this statistic: he struck out swinging only twice during the entire 1911 season. He was awarded another Chalmers, this time for being voted the AL MVP by the Baseball Writers Association of America.

On May 15 1912, Cobb assaulted Claude Lueker, a heckler, in the stands in New York. Consequently, the league suspended Cobb. However, Cobb's teammates, went on strike prior to the May 18 game in Philadelphia in order to protest the suspension. For that one game, Detroit fielded a replacement team made up of college and sandlot ballplayers, plus two Detroit coaches, and lost, 24-2. During the game, Allan Travers allowed 26 hits, the record for most hits allowed by one player in one game. The strike ended when Cobb urged his teammates to return to the field.

During Cobb's career he was involved in numerous fights, both on and off the field, and several profanity-laced shouting matches. For example, Cobb and umpire Billy Evans arranged to settle their in-game differences with a fistfight, to be conducted under the grandstand after the game. Members of both teams served as the spectators, and broke up the scuffle after Cobb had knocked Evans down, pinned him, and began choking him.

In 1917, Cobb starred in the motion picture "Somewhere in Georgia". Based on a story by sports columnist Grantland Rice, the film casts Cobb as "himself", a small-town Georgian bank clerk with a talent for baseball.

[edit] 1915-1921

Babe Ruth (left) and Ty Cobb

In 1915, Cobb set the single season steals record when he stole 96 bases. That record stood until Maury Wills broke it in 1962. Cobb’s streak of batting titles ended the following year when he finished second with .371 to Tris Speaker’s .386.

By 1920, Babe Ruth established himself as a power hitter, something Cobb was not considered. When Cobb and the Tigers showed up in New York to play the Yankees for the first time that season, writers billed it as a showdown between two stars of competing styles of play. Ruth hit two homers and a triple during the series while Cobb got only one single in the entire series.

As Ruth's popularity grew, Cobb became increasingly hostile toward him. Cobb saw Ruth not only as a threat to his style of play, but also to his style of life. While Cobb preached ascetic self-denial, Ruth gorged on hot dogs, beer, and women. Perhaps what angered him the most about Ruth was that despite Ruth's total disregard for his physical condition and traditional baseball, he was still an overwhelming success and brought fans to the ballparks in record numbers to see him set his own records.

After enduring several years of seeing his fame and notoriety usurped by Ruth, Cobb decided that he was going to show that anybody could hit home runs if he chose to. On May 5 1925, Cobb began a two-game hitting spree better than any even Ruth had unleashed. He was sitting in the dugout talking to a reporter and told him that, for the first time in his career, he was going to swing for the fences. That day, Cobb went 6 for 6, with two singles, a double, and three home runs. His 16 total bases set a new AL record. The next day he had three more hits, two of which were home runs. His single his first time up gave him 9 consecutive hits over three games. His five homers in two games tied the record set by Cap Anson of the old Chicago NL team in 1884. Cobb wanted to show that he could hit home runs when he wanted, but simply chose not to do so. At the end of the series, 38-year-old Cobb had gone 12 for 19 with 29 total bases, and then went happily back to bunting and hitting-and-running. For his part, Ruth's attitude was that "I could have had a lifetime .600 average, but I would have had to hit them singles. The people were paying to see me hit home runs."

On August 19 1921, in the second game of a double header against Elmer Myers of the Boston Red Sox Cobb collected his 3,000th hit.

[edit] Cobb as player/manager

Frank Navin, the Detroit Tigers owner, signed Cobb to take over for Hughie Jennings as manager for the 1921 season. Cobb signed the deal on his 34th birthday for $32,500. To say the least, the signing caught the baseball world off-guard. Universally disliked (even by the members of his own team) but a legendary player, Cobb's management style left a lot to be desired. He expected as much from his players as he gave, and most of the men did not meet his standard.

The closest he came to winning the pennant race was in 1924, when the Tigers finished in third place, six games behind the pennant-winning Washington Senators. The Tigers had finished second in 1922, but were 16 games behind the Yankees.

Cobb blamed his lackluster managerial record (479 wins-444 losses) on Navin, who was arguably an even bigger skinflint than Cobb. Navin passed up a number of quality players that Cobb wanted to add to the team. In fact, Navin had saved money by hiring Cobb to manage the team.

Also in 1922, Cobb tied a batting record set by Wee Willie Keeler, with four five-hit games. This has since been matched by Stan Musial, Tony Gwynn and Ichiro Suzuki.

At the end of 1925 Cobb was once again embroiled in a batting title race, this time with one of his teammates and players, Harry Heilmann. In a doubleheader against the St. Louis Browns on October 4, Heilmann got six hits, leading the Tigers to a sweep of the doubleheader and beating Cobb for the batting crown, .393 to .389. Cobb and Browns manager George Sisler each pitched in the final game. Cobb pitched a perfect inning.

[edit] Cobb moves to Philadelphia

Cobb finally called it quits from a 22-year career as a Tiger in November 1926. He announced his retirement and headed home to Augusta, Georgia. Shortly thereafter, Tris Speaker also retired as player-manager of the Cleveland team. The retirement of two great players at the same time sparked some interest, and it turned out that the two were coerced into retirement because of allegations of game-fixing brought about by Dutch Leonard, a former pitcher of Cobb's.

Leonard was unable to convince either Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis or the public that the two had done anything for which they deserved to be kicked out of baseball.

Landis allowed both Cobb and Speaker to return to their original teams, but each team let them know that they were free agents and could sign with whomever they wished. Speaker signed with the Washington Senators for 1927; Cobb signed with the Philadelphia Athletics. Speaker then joined Cobb in Philadelphia for the 1928 season. Cobb says he came back only to seek vindication and so that he could say he left baseball on his own terms.

Cobb played regularly in 1927 for a young and talented team that finished second to one of the greatest teams of all time, the 1927 Yankees, which won 110 games. He returned to Detroit to quite a welcome on May 11 1927. Cobb doubled in his first at bat, to the cheers of Tiger fans. On July 18 1927, Cobb became the first player to get 4,000 career hits when he doubled off former teammate Sam Gibson of the Detroit Tigers at Navin Field.

Cobb returned again in 1928, for no real reason other than he had nothing else to do with his life. He played less frequently due to his age and the blossoming abilities of the young A's, who were again in a pennant race with the Yankees. It was against those Yankees in September that Cobb had his last at bat, a weak pop-up behind third base. He then announced his retirement, effective at the end of the season. Ironically, had he stuck with the A's in some capacity for one more year, he might have finally got his elusive World Series ring. But it was not to be. Cobb ended his career with 23 consecutive seasons batting .300 or better (the only season under .300 being his rookie season), a Major League record not likely to be broken.

[edit] Post professional career

Cobb's plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame

On account of his Coca-Cola deal, Cobb retired a very rich and successful man. He spent his retirement pursuing his off-season activities of hunting, golfing and fishing, full-time. He also traveled extensively, both with and without his family. His other pastime was trading stocks and bonds, increasing his immense personal wealth.

In the winter of 1930, Cobb moved into a Spanish ranch estate on Spencer Lane in the millionaire's community of Atherton outside San Francisco. At that same time, his wife Charlie filed the first of several divorce suits. Charlie finally divorced Cobb in 1947, after 39 years of marriage, the last few of which she lived in nearby Menlo Park.

Cobb had never had an easy time being a father and husband. His children had found him to be demanding, yet also capable of kindness and extreme warmth. "He always wanted us to work as hard as we could at anything we did," Cobb's son James told sportswriter Ira Berkow in 1969. "Just as he did."^{[citation needed]} Cobb had expected his boys to be exceptional athletes, especially baseball players. Ty, Jr. flunked out of Princeton and would have rather played tennis than baseball, and in general was a disappointment to his father.

A personal achievement came in February 1936, when the first Hall of Fame election results were announced. Cobb had been named on 222 of 226 ballots, outdistancing Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson, the only others to earn the necessary 75% of votes to be elected in that first year. His 98.2 percentage stood as the record until Tom Seaver received 98.8% of the vote in 1992 (Nolan Ryan also surpassed Cobb, being named on 98.79% of the ballots in 1999). Those incredible results show that although many people disliked him personally, they respected the way he played and what he accomplished. In 1998, The Sporting News ranked him as third on the list of 100 Greatest Baseball Players.

By then, Cobb drank and smoked heavily, and spent a great deal of time complaining about the collapse of baseball since the arrival of Ruth. Cobb was known to help out young players. He was instrumental in helping Joe DiMaggio negotiate his rookie contract with the New York Yankees, but ended his friendship with Ted Williams when the latter suggested to him that Rogers Hornsby was a greater hitter than Cobb.

Another bittersweet moment in Cobb's life reportedly came in the late 1940s when he and sportswriter Grantland Rice were returning from the Masters golf tournament. Stopping at a South Carolina liquor store, Cobb noticed that the man behind the counter was "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, who had been banned from baseball almost 30 years earlier following the Black Sox scandal. But Jackson did not appear to recognize him, and finally Cobb asked, "Don't you know me, Joe?" “Sure I know you, Ty,” replied Jackson, “but I wasn’t sure you wanted to speak to me. A lot of them don’t.”^[4]

[edit] Second marriage

At 62, Cobb remarried. The bride was 40-year-old Frances Cass. This marriage also failed, and she later filed for divorce. She felt that he was simply too difficult to get along with when he was drunk. However, Cobb counter filed and won the suit.

When two of his three sons died young, Cobb was alone, with few friends left. He therefore began to be generous with his wealth, donating $100,000 in his parents' name for his hometown of Royston to build a modern 24 bed hospital now called the Cobb Memorial Hospital. He also established the Cobb Educational Fund, which awarded scholarships to needy Georgia students bound for college, by endowing it with a $100,000 donation in 1953.

Cobb knew that another way he could share his wealth was by having biographies written that would set the record straight and teach young players how to play. John McCallum spent some time with Cobb to write a combination how-to and biography. He, like everyone else, found Cobb difficult at best, and impossible at worst. McCallum's book came out in 1956 and was filled with half-truths and misinformation that McCallum had never checked out.^{[citation needed]}

After McCallum left, Cobb was again alone and had a longing to return to Georgia. It was on a hunting trip near his Lake Tahoe home that Cobb's long-range plans were going to be cut short, as he collapsed in pain and was diagnosed with prostate cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and Bright's disease, a degenerative kidney disorder. He returned to his Lake Tahoe lodge with painkillers and bourbon to try to ease his constant pain. He did not trust his initial diagnosis, however, so he went to Georgia to seek advice from doctors he knew, and they found his prostate to be cancerous. They removed it at Emory Hospital, but that did little to help Cobb. From this point until the end of his life, Cobb criss-crossed the country, going from his lodge in Tahoe to the hospital in Georgia.

[edit] Death

In his last days Cobb spent some time with the old movie comedian Joe E. Brown, talking about the choices Cobb had made in his life. He told Brown that he felt that he had made mistakes, and that he would do things differently if he could. He had played hard and lived hard all his life, and had no friends to show for it at the end, and he regretted it. Publicly, however, Cobb claimed not to have any regrets: "I've been lucky. I have no right to be regretful of what I did" (Newsweek, July 31, 1961, 54).

He checked into Emory Hospital for the last time in June 1961, bringing with him a paper bag with a million or so dollars in securities and his Luger pistol. This time his first wife, Charlie, his son Jimmy and other family members came to be with him for his final days. He died a month later, on July 17, 1961.

Cobb's funeral was perhaps the saddest event associated with Cobb. From all of baseball, the sport that he had dominated for over 20 years, baseball's only representatives in his funeral were three old players, Ray Schalk, Mickey Cochrane, and Nap Rucker, along with Sid Keener from the Hall of Fame.^[5] Also there were his first wife, Charlie, his two daughters, his surviving son, Jimmy, his two sons-in-law, his daughter-in-law, Mary Dunn Cobb, and her two children. The relatively sparse attendance was in great contrast to the hundreds of thousands of mourners who had turned out at Yankee Stadium and St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York to bid farewell to Cobb's great rival, Babe Ruth, in 1948.

In his will, Cobb left a quarter of his estate to the Cobb Educational Fund, and the rest of his reputed $11 million he distributed among his children and grandchildren. Cobb is interred in the Royston, Georgia town cemetery. As of 2005 the Ty Cobb Educational Foundation has distributed nearly $11 million in scholarships to needy Georgians.^[6]

[edit] Legacy

Efforts to create a Ty Cobb Memorial in Royston initially failed, primarily because most of the artifacts from his life were in Cooperstown, and the Georgia town was viewed as too remote to make a memorial worthwhile. However, on July 17 1998, on the 37th anniversary of his death, the Ty Cobb Museum opened its doors in Royston. The time had become right to honor the man in his own hometown. On August 30 2005, his hometown hosted a 1905 baseball game to commemorate 100 years since Ty Cobb played his first game. Players in the game included many of Ty's descendents as well as many citizens from his hometown of Royston, Georgia. Another early-1900s baseball game was played in his hometown at Cobb Field on September 30, 2006. Players in this game also included Ty's descendants as well as citizens from Royston. Ty's personal bat boy from his major league years was there to throw out the first pitch and witness the game.

[edit] Regular season stats

G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	CS	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG	TB	SH	HBP
3,035	11,434	2,246	4,189	724	295	117	1,937	892	178	1,249	357	.366	.433	.512	5,854	295	94

[edit] See also

Al Stump
Ty Cobb's Conlon Photo
3000 hit club
List of MLB individual streaks

[edit] References

Charles Alexander, Ty Cobb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Richard Bak, Ty Cobb: His Tumultuous Life and Times (Dallas, Tex.: Taylor, 1994).
David Pietrusza, Matthew Silverman & Michael Gershman, ed. (2000). Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia. Total/Sports Illustrated.
Al Stump, Cobb: A Biography (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1994).
Ty Cobb at the Internet Movie Database

Preceded by: George Stone	American League Batting Champion 1907-1909	Succeeded by: Nap Lajoie
Preceded by: Sam Crawford	American League Home Run Champion 1909	Succeeded by: Jake Stahl
Preceded by: Nap Lajoie	American League Triple Crown 1909	Succeeded by: Jimmie Foxx
Preceded by: First AL MVP	American League Most Valuable Player 1911	Succeeded by: Tris Speaker
Preceded by: Nap Lajoie	American League Batting Champion 1911-1915	Succeeded by: Tris Speaker
Preceded by: Tris Speaker	American League Batting Champion 1917-1919	Succeeded by: George Sisler
Preceded by: Hughie Jennings	Detroit Tigers Manager 1921–1926	Succeeded by: George Moriarty

Major League Baseball | MLB All-Century Team