Customer Reviews

My Life in Baseball: The True Record

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
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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.

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.

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.

I was born in 1951 & read Cobb's autobio around 1961. My 1st baseball biography. I like it now as much as then. It's considered "in" today to cut it & Cobb up & call it "self-serving". Well, I've read hundreds of "autobio's" since & never come across one that isn't self-serving. Isn't that the point of writing your story? I find Cobb's book no more dishonest than any other. It's true value is to get you to think as a ballplayer & offer a window into his times, how they played the game. Whether or not you like his book depends on if you like him. And I do. I think he's the greatest player ever by a long shot. So did all the players from his & Ruth's time. Ruth ONLY wins the nod among those who never saw either one play. Although Ty was emotionally unbalanced, wrapped way too tight & was wired to go off at most anything, he also was the most honest guy, and also generous. He helped dozens of guys on other teams improve their hitting & play. I highly recommend Ty's book & also Stump's later Cobb bio. Together they're something else!!

"Pink Teas and molleycoddles had best stay out." So says the the best baseball player EVER to play the game. From the blistering red clay of Georgia to the glory that was Tiger Stadium, to the cold moors of Scotland, Ty Cobb tells the story of his life and times. Is it the truth? Al Stump, who cowrote the book, would say no. Ty Cobb would say yes. In the end it doesn't really matter. I'm sure that Cobb was the man somewhere in between. You can argue and debate whether he was a good man or a bad one, but there is no debating that he played the game like it was meant to be played. A competitor the likes of which we have never seen and will likely never see again. This book is a must read simply because of the picture it paints of a man struggling to survive away from home, in a hostile place, surrounded by hostile men, but ever fighting on. "Baseball is a struggle for survival." Ty Cobb

This was a "refreshing" read, and by that I mean an interesting book written from an angle you never hear - from Ty Cobb's point of view. Cobb is such a hated figure in baseball history, I thought it would be fair to hear his side of the story, for once, and then make up my own mind.

Almost everyone in the media is so biased these days, I reccomended you get both sides of any story, if you can. If you think I'm exaggerating about the venom directed toward this Hall Of Famer, just read Jeff Silverman's review for Amazon.com on the title page here.

In Cobb's book, the Detroit Tiger admits being wrong a few times but not many. He points out where he was wronged, and in many cases it's hard to dispute.

Ty Cobb was so controversial that I have come to believe, after reading this book and other anti-Cobb accounts, that he was an extremely complex man. He did a lot of good, a lot of kind deeds, and yet he was cutthroat, bitter and nasty at the same time. I'm sure he was not fun to play with, but he wasn't the Devil as most people portray him today.

Those who criticize this book for being too biased are biased themselves. Believe me, it was very interesting to hear Cobb's side of the story and why he acted the way he did. With Cobb, who was a very literate man, you know he'll keep the book entertaining. Highly recommended.

"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 freinds, 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."

This book had been called "one of sports literature's great whitewashes and cover-ups" but that characterization has to re-evaluated in what we now know about the co-author: Al Stump. In 2010, Al Stump was shown to have been a forger and an author of false documents concerning Ty Cobb. A alleged Cobb diary presented to the baseball hall of fame was proved in 2009 to have been a forgery. He had even sold a shotgun to a collector which he alleged was the gun which killed Cobb's father. (Cobb's father was not killed by a shotgun). Stump's reputation is now effectively destroyed and nothing he said has much remaining credibility. That calls for a re-evaluation of this book and the stories around it.

Al Stump later claimed that this book, written with Cobb and approved by Cobb, was not the truth. Stump claimed to have been kidnapped by Cobb and forced to write the book a particular way. Stump also traded after the book was written in variety of lured stories: (i.e. the killing of Cobbs father, Cobb killing people during his career, Cobb fixing games, Cobb firing guns in hospital rooms and so on).

For many years, this book has been dismissed as untrue or manipulative due to Cobb's influence. But in light of what we know of Al Stump now, everything written in the last 20 years about Cobb needs to be re-evaluated. This book still has two flaws: (1) It was written by Stump and (2) Its an autobiography and as such will reflect the point of view of the subject. But with a degree of caution, it can probably be used as a source for Cobbs view of himself and events in his life.

In light of what we know now, Stump's later "Cobb: A Biography" needs to be dismissed as this book was once dismissed. This book has been rehabilitated. Though Stump's hand in it will always raise some questions.

Of all the books that are out there about Ty Cobb, this one rings the truest. Although ghostwritten by Al Stump (author of "Cobb"), it is written from audio recordings, interviews, and time spent with Cobb while he talked about his fellow players and his life. Its content and wording are glossed over by Stump, but the basic Cobb still comes through. If you want to get a feel for the man, read his book and get it straight from the horse's mouth.

Ty Cobb's masterpiece brought me as an eleven year old boy into the smoky, tobacco-chewing world of baseball's exciting, seamy origins, when fans could hear of a pennant-determining game's progress only by word of mouth, because even radio had not yet become a medium. These decades later, Cobb's crystal-clear portraits of Pie Traynor, Honus Wagner, and Babe Ruth shine in my mind still vividly.