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Cobb: A Biography

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Was Tyrus Cobb as good as you imagined? Better.

Did Tyrus Cobb innovate the game? Absolutely.

Did a worse human being play the game? Maybe not.

Al Stump focused on the first and especially the third question above. Being a sports writer, Stump knows that a healthy legend and juicy scandel sells books. In this book Stump gives excellent descriptions of some of the most famous incidents in baseball- mostly from the mouth of Cobb with whom Stump spent parts of a year interviewing. Perhaps that time tainted Stump. For example, Stump repeatedly mentions the 'extreme cruelty' Charlotte Cobb used as grounds for divorce. He fails to mention that Mrs. Cobb stressed that it was mental and never physical abuse. Why? Perhaps Stump intended to paint Cobb as completly vile. Perhaps Cobb deserved it. But this important information for a book of nearly 500 pages to fail to mention. Stump keeps a highly negative focus on Cobb the man while building up Cobb the player.

I finished this book disliking Cobb the man, convinced Cobb the player would have dominated ANY era, and wanting to know more- so I read Alexander's book. Charles Alexander's "Ty Cobb" provides a more complete, less biased view of Cobb in about half the pages. The Stump book is more colorful however.

However well written this book is, its author has been totally disgraced and can no longer be considered any sort of trustworthy source for anything to do with Ty Cobb. Al Stump has been revealed in a variety of sources to have been a forger of memorabilia and documents related to Ty Cobb. In The National Pastime, the official publication of the Society for American Baseball Research, his reputation was completely destroyed in 2010.

He forged a Cobb diary that ended up being displayed prominently at the hall of fame until the FBI proved it was a fake in 2009. He even sold a shotgun he claimed was the gun that killed Cobbs father. The eventual problem being that Cobb's father wasn't killed by a shotgun.

We are left in a situation now where its difficult to know where to begin reconstructing who Ty Cobb was. The author of this book has so clouded the perception of who he was, that getting back to anything like the truth is going to be enormously difficult. But the first step toward the truth is banishing everything written by this person from being taken seriously.

This book is a quick read for baseball fans, and an interesting look at the psychosis of an American icon for non-baseball fans. Al Stump went through a living hell while writing Ty Cobb's ghost-written autobiography and thirty years later he tells Cobb's true story. The story of Cobb's obnoxious, cruel behavior is told in detail, with Stump's vicious pen tearing at the soul of the legend. It is rare in biographies to see a writer tear at the subject, but Stump does it as a reconciliation with his soul. In between the lines, Stump comes to terms with his own demons, and it brings the book to life. Every one of Cobb's misgivings and psychotic rampages is shown, and his one truly great asset, that of being the greatest baseball player of all time, is also given full credit. An amazing work for its balance between the two worlds of writing the truth and writing what our legends want us to see is covered. Al Stump wrote the story of an American legend in everyday life in Cobb, and leaves the reader one possible conclusion, Cobb isn't the man we want our children to emulate.

Unfortunately, some bad news has come out on Al Stump. He seems to have stolen memorabilia from Cobb and forged quite a few Cobb documents. These activities, at the very least, call into question the accuracy of this biography. For details on Stump, check out Rob Neyer's SweetSpot blog entry (Friday Filberts) for August 6, 2010 posted to the site of the world-wide leader in sports. [I don't think I'm allowed to name the site or post a link.] Or do a search on William R. Cobb and The Georgia Peach and you can find the relevant article.

Whether you love or hate Ty Cobb, you will love this book. It tells the whole Cobb story, from his humble beginnings to his pathetic last days. I am a lifelong baseball fan but learned a great deal of new information about Cobb. Stump confirms that Cobb was possibly the greatest and definitely the nastiest ballplayer of them all. Even if you are not a huge baseball fan, you will be entertained and amazed by one Cobb anecdote after another. Cobb truly transcended the game.

This book does the same as the magazine article, Stump wrote too many years ago after Cobb's death and the completion of the book he wrote with Cobb.

This book does the same as the magazine article, Stump wrote too many years ago after Cobb's death and the completion of the book he wrote with Cobb. In Charles Alexander's recent introduction of Cobb's autobiography, he wrote this of Al Stump:

"Stump recounted his experiences with Cobb in an article "Ty Cobb's Wild Ten-Month Fight to Live," published in True, a male-oriented monthly magazine specializing in risqué adventure...Much of the article reads like a gothic horror story...For those who preferred to remember Cobb's good qualities and let his faults be buried with his physical remains, Stump's article was at best an exercise in poor taste, and at worst a severe injustice to a man who had done much for his hometown and substantial good otherwise. (Stump mislead readers in implying that he had been Cobb's companion nearly all the time, when in fact he had seen him only a few times during that "wild" ten-month period.")...Stump...made no efforts to check facts. Thus the book included a number of mistaken dates, places, people, and situations...Unable to do much sustained work with Cobb, Stump relied considerably on a seven-part biographical sketch published in 1950 in the Sporting News by H.G. Salsinger, longtime Detroit Baseball writer and one of Cobb's few real friends, as well as Cobb's 1952 Life articles and a book put together three years later by Cobb and John D. McCallum, combining reminiscences with tips on how to play the game."

A "natural" with a Napoleonic complex ("He knew how to win against the odds"), Tyrus R Cobb was, in the words of his biographer Al Stump, "the most chilling, the eeriest of all American sport figures". In fact, Mr Stump's impressed if sometimes impatient "Cobb" (1994) is subtitled "The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball"; and Mr Stump, who has contributed to Esquire and Sports Illustrated, has the anecdotes to prove it -- some from the Georgia Peach himself. Mr Stump helped Cobb write his memoirs in 1960, and it seems their collaboration was wary, to put it mildly. One thing Mr Stump never had any doubt about: Cobb was a great player. With a career batting average of .367 (compared to Honus Wagner's .329, for instance) and 6,294 put-outs, he was formidable both at bat or in the outfield. Then there was the draconian side: the bullying of team mates (even worse when he became player/manager of the Detroit Tigers) and using his spikes as stilettoes against opponents. Cobb had a reputation as a virulent racist, his hatred of Negroes causing him on one occasion to even beat up a black woman. During his rivalry with Babe Ruth Cobb's ethnic prejudice went so haywire he accused Ruth of being the product of miscegenation and applied all the common slurs. He also attacked fans (as did Ruth), sending at least one to the hospital. Of course, the "cranks" often asked for it, the stands filled with a rudeness and disrespect mainly confined today to a stadium which shall remain unnamed. Cobb's personal life and the reasons for his problems are sketchy. The razzing he received as a rookie, added to a bizarre family tragedy, caused him to have a nervous breakdown at the age of twenty. Some of Cobb's contemporaries thought he was truly insane, but the explanation for his behavior could be less drastic. Emotionally selfish (though financially generous) and subject to tantrums, it could be he simply never grew up; but Mr Stump doesn't explore the complexities that thoroughly. Of the 20 photographic illustrations in the book only one shows one of his five children. The wives are not pictured at all. Cobb was married twice and divorced twice. The second wife is barely mentioned; the first wife was strictly kinder Kirche Küche. As Cobb grew older, the Game grew away from him. His despotic attitude (Mr Stump calls him "the Torquemada of the ballpark") became unacceptable to a new breed of better-educated ballplayer, and his rejection of the Ruthian home run meant that many of his tactics didn't work anymore. He died in 1961, an alcoholic alienated millionaire, admired by Mr Stump though he felt distanced from Cobb. (Just three of Cobb's fellow players attended his funeral.) The fact that Mr Stump wrote this lengthy biography is proof that he thought Ty Cobb was an athlete worthy of respect and remembrance for his professional intelligence. As Connie Mack said: "His secret is that he thinks two plays ahead of everybody else."

Al Stump was chosen to ghostwrite the memoirs of Ty Cobb in 1960. After almost a year of research and harrowing experiences, "My Life in Baseball: The True Record" was published. The final product, which bore the name of Ty Cobb, was, in the words of Stump, self-serving. So much of the Cobb story either remained untold or was sanitized that Stump decided to write a corrective article for True Magazine. This article brought accolades and eventually "Cobb" published some 30 years after the original Cobb autobiography.

Ty Cobb was the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and from a purely baseball perspective, he was most certainly deserving. Many of baseball's pioneers are given short shrift today and even devoted fans are ignorant of their accomplishments and the conditions under which they played. Low pay, abuse by owners, no helmets, beanballs, doctored balls and dim lighting were all circumstances that ball players from the early part of the 20th century had to endure. To then realize that some of the personages in the book (Cobb, Mathewson, etc.) excelled in this environment is staggering. I could list Cobb's accomplishments....homeplate steals, his lifetime batting average or any of the other statistics that imbue baseball with its unique charm, but suffice it to say that Tyrus Cobb is arguably the greatest player to ever don a cap. It is of course the case that this is not the whole story. If it were, Cobb would be remembered much more fondly; however, this biography may not have been necessary and even if it were written, it would likely be less interesting.

The dark side of Cobb make him a decidedly unsympathetic human being. Here was a man possessed of great intelligence, business acumen, persistence. A fierce competitor with a certain sense of honor who, for example, was instrumental in forming baseball's first union (the Baseball Players Fraternity) to protect the rights of all players. He also set up a charitable foundation (the Cobb Educational Fund) to aid bright but poor students from Georgia. This normally taciturn man was reported to have cried when some of the students helped by his endowment tearfully thanked him. Yet within this same man existed a person who was bigoted, foul-mouthed, humorless and prone to violent outbursts when he felt wronged.

In the preface, the author writes "During the long stretches of time we spent together, my feelings for Ty Cobb were often in flux." Every chapter in this page-turner of a book provoked the same sense of ambivalence in me. While some of his on-field antics, and especially his bigotry, are painful to read and well-nigh impossible to forgive, his talents and the tragedies which he experienced make him a figure not easy to dismiss or forget. The untimely death of his beloved father and the subsequent murder charges levied against his mother seem to have set the stage for an adulthood destined to be memorialized in print or perhaps even the silver screen.

At the time of his death, Cobb was estranged from his surviving children. The book concludes with Al Stump telling us "....the funeral of the most shrewd, inventive, lurid, detested, mysterious, and superb of all baseball players went unattended by any official representative of the game at which he excelled." Whether you are a baseball fan or not, this book is an informative and compelling read.

Those who saw the movie "Cobb" know that it centers on the last year and a half of Ty Cobb's life, when he hired sportswriter Al Stump to help him write an autobiography [though Cobb was a highly literate man, who really didn't need a ghostwriter]. Ty Cobb was dying, and knew it; cancer and diabetes were about finished with him, and he wanted to tell his story while he could. This is Al Stump's story of that experience.

Ty Cobb was a strange, difficult, complex, man. His manner was not designed to make him well liked, but he really didn't care. His fellow Tigers may not have cared for him, but they were well aware that he was the greatest player in the game, and that he gave 100% on the field. Some of the popular stories [the sharpened spikes, and, until cancer got the best of him, the drinking] are lies, but the statistics aren't. Cobb always saw himself as an outsider, a member of an aristocratic Southern family, who really didn't belong.

Cobb and Stump had quite a time, and Cobb's book did get written. They visited casinos, churches, the Hall of Fame, Cobb's daughter [who rejected him, though she was willing to have his money after he died], and got Ty his medical care. Stump stayed till the end. Al discovered that Ty was financially supporting a number of old ballplayers, and their widows...he turned Christ's admonition around, publicizing his bad deeds, and keeping the good secret [the support was anonymous; Cobb's lawyer hired another lawyer to pay it].

A psychiatrist could have a grand time with Ty Cobb. PTSD? Probably...what his Mom did to his Dad would throw anybody for a loop. Cobb did give his mother all the love money could buy, but even that may have been more than she deserved. He took chances, from the way he played ball, to his Army service as a Captain in the Poison Gas Division in WWI...no soft job in Special Services for Ty Cobb.

This is a fine book about a very difficult subject...brilliant, hard driven, complex, Ty Cobb was the greatest baseball player that ever lived. He may have had some faults as a person, but NOT as a ballplayer. You can't understand Ty Cobb in one book any more than you can Thomas Jefferson [there actually are parallels]...Al Stump obviously disliked his subject, but his skill and honesty are enough to make the greatness shine thru. Read this, but also read Charles Alexander, and Cobb's own book.

This is a searing biography of baseball legend Ty Cobb (1887-1961). As the author shows Cobb was a superbly talented and intelligent ballplayer, and he still has the highest lifetime batting average (.367). Cobb was also intensely competitive, and so mean and fast-tempered that even roughneck players feared and detested him. The author examines Cobb's upbringing in Georgia (including his father's being shot dead by his mother) and his long career (1905-1928) in baseball. Readers learn of Cobb's many batting and stolen base titles, his unproven involvement in a 1919 fix, and his years as player-manager for the Detroit Tigers. Cobb was careful with his dollars and blessed with investment savvy that made him rich - players calling him "penny pincher" had an instant fight on their hands. The book also takes a brief look at his life after his playing days ended.

As many know, a dying Cobb hired the author to write his autobiography - and that first book said what Cobb wanted. This second and more honest effort appeared three decades later, and is far from pretty. We see Cobb as a volatile racist lout, unpopular as a player, and shunned in his later years by both his family and by those struggling ex-players that the financially generous Cobb helped. This second biography is relentless, revealing, and not for those with a weak stomach.