Rating: 
Summary: A not-so-sweet Peach
Review: 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."
Rating: 
Summary: Riveting
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book About a Great Ballplayer and a Terrible Man
Review: Al Stump, who spent nearly a year with Ty Cobb near the end of Cobb's life and wrote My Life in Baseball: The True Record with him, is the natural choice as his biographer. He does a fine job here. While the earlier book is simply a narration of incidents whose narration is inevitably distorted in Cobb's favor, this book is an earnest attempt to present a fair picture of its subject.
Stump bends over backwards to be fair to the eminently dislikeable Cobb; indeed, that is the book's primary fault. For example, on several occasions, the book mentions Cobb's excellence as a defensive center fielder, yet statistics posted early in the book give his lifetime fielding percentage as .961, with 274 errors in 3,033 games. Cobb clearly won games with his bat and legs, but he lost them with his glove and arm. Stump also mentions the oft-narrated incident in 1925 in which the thirty-eight-year old Cobb allegedly told two sportswriters before a game that he would abandon his hands-apart hitting style and attempt to hit home runs. He went six-for-six in the game, with three home runs and a double. The next day he hit two home runs and a single. The natural question to ask is why, if Cobb could get nine hits, including five home runs, in nine at-bats while trying to hit home runs, he didn't stick with it, since his career average was approximately three hits in eight at bats, none of them home runs. Is the story apocryphal? Did Cobb simply know that the starting pitchers for the next two games were pitchers against which he had had unusual success in the past? Stump never even asks the question.
There are other flaws. Stump spends the first 400 pages of the book on the first forty-two years of Cobb's life, covering the period from his birth to the end of his major league career, but only twenty on the remaining thirty-three. Of course, Cobb would be of little interest had he not been a great baseball player, but, given that Cobb was clearly seriously mentally ill, it would have been a good idea, I think, to spend more time on, for example, the causes of the break-ups of his two marriages. Stump, moreover, calls Cobb psychotic in several places in the book. It would also, I think, have been a good idea for him to consult with one or more mental health professionals for a more precise diagnosis.
These, though, are minor reservations about a book that held my interest from the first page to the last. All serious baseball fans will want to read this book, and even many of those who are not very interested in baseball will find it interesting.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating human being!
Review: Baseball aside, this book is more about one of the most compelling public figures in U.S. History. Nothing is boring with Cobb, everything is interesting, everything is stimulating. Clearly one of the most dynamic individuals in all of U.S. History and Stump magnificantly retells the life and events of the greatest baseball player of all time.
Rating:
Summary: Best Biography ever written
Review: Because my grandparents died when I was young, I never got to hear anything about Ty Cobb. After reading this book, I feel like I was at every game, became his roommate on the road trips, and even got into a few of the brawls with him. Anyone who wants to understand Ty Cobb, from the genious and ferocity he brought onto the field, to the wild, ill-tempered melees he got into off the field, must read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Al Stump deserves a medal of honor
Review: How Al Stump could have tolerated living with Ty Cobb while being his acquaintance (friend?), nursemaid, gopher, and storywriter, should be considered an act of charity. For the opportunity to write a story (whose facts may have been altered somewhat at Cobb's insistence)about baseball's greatest competitor (and batter), Stump put his life on the line. His depiction of a tired, ailing, psycotic and bitter old man who half-heartedly wanted the world to know "the truth" about Tyrus Raymond Cobb evoked so many emotions that I couldn't put the book down. If you want to know about the life of Ty Cobb - for better or worse - this book is an eye opener.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: I had preconceptions about Ty Cobb before picking up this book. I thought of him as a violent, aggressive, mean, bigoted, hateful, borderline psychotic. A few pages in and I realised how wrong I was. I hadn't even realised a tenth of how violent, aggressive, mean, bigoted and hateful an out-and-out psychopath Ty Cobb was. Stump brings this most unpleasant, fascinating, brilliant man to life vividly and enthrallingly. We shall not look upon his like again, thankfully. One of the very best baseball biographies of all time.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating.......Cobb is a masterpiece
Review: I have read several baseball books but none have been more interesting than Cobb. Al Stump reveals Cobb's deepest and darkest secrets and shows Cobb in all his terrifying glory. This is a must read for any baseball fan.
Rating:
Summary: Simply Magnificent!
Review: I made the foolish mistake of actually reading this book after watching the movie "Cobb". Talk about going in with expectations that were so far off what you had seen and been led to believe. This book was the most exhillarating reading experience that I can remember in a very long time. It held me captive from the very beginning to the very end. I actually was disappointed that it ended. I thought that Charles Alexander did a great job in his book, "Ty Cobb". Al Stump exceeded it with a simple, but effective writing style that allowed your imagination to roam back to the early 1900's. Al Stump confirmed what I always knew, but was afraid to admit about Cobb: He was one of the meanest SOB's that ever lived on the face of the earth. He was also the greatest player that ever graced and disgraced the game. Anthony DeMedeiros, Toronto, Ontario
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