My Life in Baseball: The True Record [Unknown Binding]

Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• ISBN-10: 0585310602
• ISBN-13: 978-0585310602
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,713,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Despite Stumps' Revision, This Is One of the Great Basball Books, March 31, 2000

By 

Tim R. Niles "Nomad" (Silicon Valley) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: My Life in Baseball: The True Record (Paperback)

I bought this book through the Sport (Magazine) Book Club inabout 1962 when I was twelve and learned more about how to playbasball from it than from any other source.

You don't have to be a driven old man with a lot of ugly qualities to recognize this book for what it is: magnificent lessons in the art and science of baseball.

Ty Cobb succeeded at baseball, he succeeded at making money, and he may have been a failure in many ways as a human being, BUT this book is a fitting remembrance of his approach to baseball.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A side of Ty Cobb never seen before!, January 19, 2000

By 

Michael J Woznicki "Michael J Woznicki" (Holland, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Life in Baseball: The True Record (Paperback)

When you think of hard nose, intense play to win ball players, the first name that comes to mind is Ty Cobb. This book, which is one of the best books about Cobb, shows the side of the man who was most hated in the game he excelled at, baseball.

The story of Tyrus Raymond Cobb is one that will forever be both myth and fact blended together. What this book does is gives the reader a greater understanding and appreciation of a man who ruled baseball for more than 20 years.

You look into the history of more than baseball; you'll see the life outside of baseball, and the life most people never knew. Walk through the past and relive the glory of the game with the greatest hitter of all time. What this book reveals is more than sports history, it's far more.

Ty Cobb is baseball and Ty Cobb the man is more than the legend. The book is must have for those that love baseball. You'll find yourself captured from page one. A real hall of fame book about a real hall of fame player.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One big story, with a million entertaining substories., August 19, 2003

By 

Deanna Rubin (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life in Baseball: The True Record (Paperback)

I really enjoyed reading this book. It was the first book about Cobb that I had ever read; before that, he was just a name and statistics to me.

The overarcing story of this book is Ty Cobb's career in baseball, with a little bit about his life before and a few flashes into his life after. Now, it would be easy to sum up a career in baseball with several numbers, a few game highlights, etc. But that is not what you'll find in this book. What you'll find is a ton of short, 5-10 paragraph interludes about almost every big name in baseball from the 1905-1928 period... and even big names elsewhere. Ty Cobb was fortunate enough to have interacted with everyone from actors to presidents to business executives, and he has humorous angles on each of them. I actually laughed out loud several times while reading this book at the way he portrayed various people.

In a lot of ways, reading this book is almost like listening to your grandfather tell stories of his adventures and his friends in his youth. Except it's not your grandfather, it's Ty Cobb, telling stories of the Golden Age of Baseball, and his friends were legends like Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Connie Mack, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, Nap Lajoie, and others who may also simply be names in the Hall of Fame to you. Cobb's stories bring life to long-dead names, color to old black-and-white photos. Most of us have only heard legends of those early parks, players, pennants, pitches, pundits. Cobb was there. And through reading his story, it almost feels like you were there, too.

While I've read other reviews that say this book hides the Dark Side of Ty Cobb, I don't think that is entirely true. He definitely talks about some ways he treated people, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson, that makes you realize that at his core he was a man who would stop at nothing to win.

It doesn't matter if you like Ty Cobb or hate Ty Cobb. If you want to hear some great baseball stories, read this book.