Customer Reviews

The Ty Cobb Scrapbook: An Illustrated Chronology of Significant Dates in the 24-Year Career of the Fabled Georgia Peach

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It was a refreshing look from a contemporary view of this fasinating era of baseball. Crammed full of interesting pictures. The Author certainly portrays Cobb as a baseball player extroadinaire. This book adornes my coffee table and is great for sneaking in a quick look from the "Deadball area."

When I was reading the foreword to this book, my skeptical nature regarding the contents kicked in. The two sentences

"Unfortunately his ranking and reputation have been unfairly tarnished in recent years by the exaggeration of his persona as a despicable demon so hateful and so driven by a competitive fire that he was everybody's enemy in his lifetime and therefore undeserving to be considered as arguably the game's greatest player. Characterizing Cobb as an agent of the devil and an unworthy citizen has become fashionable among contemporary writers and seems to get worse with each modern treatise by authors who never saw him play and never bothered to examine contemporary writings from the years he played."

This is incorrect; all of the historical evidence indicates that Cobb was hated by nearly all of his teammates on the Detroit Tigers as well as by nearly all of the opposing players. If anything, the stories about Ty Cobb have become more accurate over the years and the emphasis has been more on his accomplishments on the baseball field rather than the ugly incidents due to his violent temper and vindictive nature.
Fortunately, this position is not interjected into the descriptions of Cobb's actions in games. The book is a collection of brief summaries of games and it is clear from the style that they were written at the time. A large number of photographs, many very grainy, are included, which I found very interesting for a lot of them were of players that I had heard of but where I had never seen a picture.
Although it is told in snippets, this is an excellent history of Ty Cobb the player. He was certainly one of the most ferociously competitive players of all time and it can be argued that he was the best player of all time. One of the most telling aspects of this book is how often the quality of his fielding is mentioned, which is rare elsewhere. Other authors concentrate on his batting and base running and almost never mention some of the defensive plays he made.