Encyclopedia
Tyrus Raymond "Ty" Cobb , nicknamed
"the Georgia Peach", was a
Hall of Fame baseball player. When he retired in 1928, he was the holder of ninety major league records. Cobb also received the most votes of any player on the 1936 inaugural Hall of Fame Ballot.
Early life
Cobb was born in Narrows, Georgia as the first of three children to Amanda Chitwood Cobb and William Herschel Cobb. In 1893, W.H. Cobb, a teacher by profession, bought a one hundred acre farm in
Royston, Georgia. Ty was raised on this farm.
Ty spent his first years in baseball as a member of the Royston Rompers and the semi-pro Royston Reds. W.H. greatly disapproved of Ty playing baseball for fear that Ty would become a drunken womanizer like the stereotypical big league ballplayers of the day. However, in 1904 Ty approached his father about trying out for the Augusta Tourists of the Sally League. W.H. agreed to let Ty try out.
Minor League Career
Ty made the roster for the Tourists, but was cut two days into the season. Cobb then asked his father for permission to try out for a semi-pro team in Anniston, Alabama. In Cobb's account of the conversation he said that his father gave him permission to go, but warned him, "Don't come home a failure."
Cobb tried out and made the roster for the Anniston Steelers of the Tennessee-Alabama League. He then reportedly promoted the event by sending several postcards to Grantland Rice, the sports editor of the
Atlanta Journal under several different aliases. Eventually, Rice wrote a small note in the Journal that a "young fellow named Cobb seems to be showing an unusual lot of talent." W.H. kept this press clipping in his wallet until his death.
After about three months, Ty received a telegram from Augusta asking him to return. Cobb accepted the offer but his return to Augusta proved unfruitful. He finished the season hitting a meager .237 in 35 games.
Andy Roth, the new manager for the Tourists, wanted Cobb back for the following season, but Cobb demanded a raise to $125 per month. It was the first of many salary disputes in his career. Despite the fact that he was asking a lot for a teenager with less than a season's experience, Roth consented and he rejoined the team in the spring of 1905.
By August 1905, Cobb was leading the league in hitting. The Tourists' management sold their star player to the
American League's
Detroit Tigers for $750. Cobb was given a $50 gold watch as a gift in his final appearance with the Augusta Tourists.
On August 8, 1905, shortly before Ty's debut in the major leagues, W.H. was shot to death by Ty's mother. W.H. had suspected Amanda was cheating on him and told her that he was going out of town. He returned later that evening to check up on her by climbing up onto the roof outside the master bedroom. When Mrs. Cobb saw an unidentified figure in the window , she picked up a
shotgun and fired, killing her husband. She was arrested and charged with voluntary manslaughter, but was later acquitted.
Major League Career
The early years
Three weeks after his mother killed his father, Cobb was playing center field for the
Detroit Tigers. On August 30, 1905, in his first major league at-bat, Cobb doubled off the
New York Highlanders's
Jack Chesbro. That season, Cobb managed to bat only .240 in 41 games. Nevertheless, he showed enough promise as a rookie for the Tigers to give him a lucrative $1,500 contract for 1906. Although rookie hazing was customary, Cobb could not endure it in good humor, and he soon became alienated from his teammates. He later attributed his hostile temperament to this experience: "These old-timers turned me into a snarling wildcat."
The following year he became the Tigers' full-time center fielder and hit .316 in 98 games. He would never hit below that mark again. Cobb, firmly entrenched in centerfield, led the Tigers to three consecutive American League Pennants from 1907-1909. They would lose all three matchups.
In one notable 1907 game, Cobb reached first, stole second, stole third, and then stole home on consecutive attempts. Despite great success on the field, Cobb was no stranger to controversy off it. At Spring Training in 1907, he fought a black groundskeeper over the condition of the Tigers' field in Augusta, Georgia. Ty also ended up choking the man's wife when she intervened. He finished that season with a league high .350 batting average, 212 hits, 49 steals and 119 RBI.
In September of 1907 Cobb began a relationship with
Coca-Cola that would last his entire life and make him a very rich man. In 1918 Cobb took a loan out against his future baseball earnings to buy his first 1000 shares of Coca-Cola stock. By the time he died, he owned three bottling plants, in
Santa Maria, California,
Twin Falls, Idaho and
Bend, Oregon and owned over 20,000 shares of stock.
The following season the Tigers bested the
White Sox for the pennant. Cobb again won the batting title, although he "only" hit .324 that year. Despite the another loss in the Series, Cobb had something to celebrate. In August 1908 he married Charlotte "Charlie" Marion Lombard, the daughter of prominent Augustan Roswell Lombard.
The Tigers won the American League pennant again in 1909. During the Series Cobb stole home in the second game, igniting a three-run rally, but that was the high point for Cobb. He ended batting a lowly .231 in his last World Series. Not surprisingly, the Tigers lost in seven games. Although he performed poorly in the postseason, Cobb won the Triple Crown by hitting .377 with 107 RBI and nine home runs - all inside-the-park.
The Conlon photo
One day in New York, in 1909,
Charles M. Conlon snapped an action photo of Cobb sliding into third base, an image that has been reprinted countless times. For publication, the original photo was cropped on the right, taking away almost half of the image. That is the version everyone saw until
Baseball's Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon was published in 1993. The excised portion was included and shows more of the right-side bleachers, as well as the left arm of the third base coach.
Conlon was actually on the field with his big camera, a common practice of the day. He was positioned to the outfield side of the third base coach's box. Cobb was on second. New York third baseman Jimmy Austin was playing in for a possible sacrifice bunt. Cobb took off for third, but the batter did not get the bunt down. Austin backpedaled to take the throw from the catcher. Cobb spilled Austin and the catcher's throw sailed into left field. Presumably Cobb could have gotten up and scored, but the book does not elaborate.
Instead, the issue was whether Conlon got the shot or not. He changed plates, just to be safe, because he did not remember if he had squeezed the shutter bulb or not, and he knew it had potential to be a great shot. It turned out that he did, it was, and baseball had one of its iconic images.
1910 Chalmers Award controversy
In 1910, Cobb and
Nap Lajoie were neck-and-neck for the American League batting title. Cobb was ahead by a slight margin going into the last day of the season. The prize for the winner of the title was a
Chalmers Automobile. Cobb sat out the game to preserve his average. Lajoie, whose team was playing the
St. Louis Browns, notched seven hits in a doubleheader to pass Cobb. Six of those hits were bunt singles that fell in front of the third baseman. It turned out that Browns manager, Jack O'Connor, had ordered third baseman Red Corriden to play deep, on the outfield grass, so as to allow the popular Lajoie to win the title. AL president Ban Johnson declared Cobb the official batting average winner after some wrangling. The Chalmers people, however, decided to award an automobile to both Cobb and Lajoie. The next year, the Chalmers Award was given to the player "most valuable" to his team, and the modern Most Valuable Player Award was born, with Cobb winning the American League version unanimously.
Muddying the waters further, it is the 1910 season which accounts for the statistical discrepancy in Cobb's career hit total, which was long reported as 4,191. A Detroit Tigers box score was mistakenly counted twice in the season-ending calculations, thus giving Cobb an extra 2-for-3. Beyond awarding him two nonexistent hits, it also raised Cobb's 1910 batting average from .383 to .385. Lajoie is credited with a .384 average for the 1910 season, and thus the downwardly revised figure would also cost Cobb one of his 12 batting titles. With the Browns deliberately helping an opponent to surpass a total which was unknowingly inaccurate, the ensuing mathematical mess was described by one writer, "It could be said that 1910 produced two bogus leading batting averages, and one questionable champion."
The 1911 Season
One of Cobb's most devastating approaches to baseball and perhaps the one that left the most lasting impression was his psychological intimidation. Cobb was having an incredible year in 1911, including a 40-game hitting streak. But by the end of the season,
”Shoeless” Joe Jackson had a 9 point lead on him in batting average. Very near the end of the season, Cobb’s Tigers had a long series against Jackson and the
Naps. Cobb and Jackson were friendly both on and off the field, both being Southerners. Cobb used that friendliness for his gain. As he discussed in his autobiography, Cobb would ignore Jackson whenever Jackson said anything to him. Then Cobb would snap angrily at Jackson making him wonder what he could have done to so anger Cobb. Cobb felt that it was those mind games of his that caused Jackson to "fall off" to a final average of .408, while Cobb himself sailed home with a .420 average, 248 hits, 147 runs scored, 127 RBI, 83 stolen bases, and the league lead in doubles, triples, and slugging average. The only major offensive category which Cobb did not lead in was home runs, where
Frank Baker surpassed him 11-8. Cobb's dominance at the plate is suggested by this statistic: he struck out swinging only twice during the entire 1911 season. He was awarded another Chalmers, this time for being voted the AL MVP by the
Baseball Writers Association of America.
Cobb's temper
On May 15, 1912, Cobb assaulted Claude Lueker, a heckler, in the stands in New York. Lueker and Cobb traded insults with each other throughout the first three innings, and the situation climaxed when Lueker called Cobb a "half-nigger." Cobb then climbed into the stands and attacked the handicapped Lueker, who after an industrial accident lost all of one hand and three fingers on his other hand. The league suspended him; and his teammates, though not fond of Cobb, went on strike to protest the suspension prior to the May 18 game in Philadelphia. For that one game, Detroit fielded a replacement team made up of college and sandlot ballplayers, plus two Detroit coaches, and lost, 24-2. Some of major league baseball's all-time negative records were established in this game, notably the 26 hits allowed by Allan Travers, who pitched the sport's most unlikely complete game. The strike ended when Cobb urged his teammates to return to the field.
Cobb mastered baseball, but he never mastered his temper. During his career he was involved in numerous fights, both on and off the field, and several profanity-laced shouting matches. Cobb once slapped a black elevator operator for being "uppity." When a black night watchman intervened, Cobb pulled out a knife and stabbed him.
On another occasion, Cobb and umpire
Billy Evans arranged to settle their in-game differences with a fistfight, to be conducted under the grandstand after the game. Members of both teams served as the spectators, and broke up the scuffle after Cobb had knocked Evans down, pinned him, and began choking him.
In 1917, Cobb starred in the motion picture "Somewhere in Georgia". Based on a story by sports columnist Grantland Rice, the film casts Cobb as "himself", a small-town Georgian bank clerk with a talent for baseball.
Baseball starts to change
Cobb kept dominating the league winning batting titles in every year until 1915. Also in 1915 Cobb set the single season steals record with 96 which stood until Maury Wills broke it in 1962. Cobb’s streak of batting titles ended the following year when he finished second with .371 to
Tris Speaker’s .386. In 1919, a young pitcher from the
Boston Red Sox named
Babe Ruth began to come on strong as a home run hitter by shattering the 40-year old home run record by hitting 29 round-trippers. Cobb abhorred Ruth's power game, and when he saw fans becoming enamored of the Babe, he was afraid that the "inside style" of bunting, taking the extra base and hitting the ball to gaps that he had perfected would fall by the wayside.
Ruth started the 1920 season on a pace to destroy his own record. Therefore, when Cobb and the Tigers showed up in
New York to play the Yankees for the first time that season, writers billed it as a showdown between two stars of competing styles of play. Ruth easily won this mini-battle, with two homers and a triple, while Cobb got only one single in the entire series.
Despite this poor showing, many MLB professionals still favored Cobb, according even to Ruth's own manager, Miller Huggins. The venerable
Tris Speaker once said, "Babe was a great ballplayer, but Cobb was even greater." Most of the fans, however, even in Cobb's own home city of Detroit, now came to watch Ruth instead of Cobb. The fans began to prefer the excitement of the home run rather than the strategy and cunning moves of the hit and run and double steal.
As Ruth's popularity grew, Cobb became increasingly hostile toward him. Cobb saw Ruth not only as a threat to his style of play, but also to his style of life. While Cobb preached ascetic self-denial, Ruth gorged on hot dogs, beer, and women. Perhaps what angered him the most about Ruth was that despite Ruth's total disregard for his physical condition and traditional baseball, he was still an overwhelming success and brought fans to the ballparks in record numbers to see him set his own records.
After enduring several years of seeing his fame and notoriety usurped by Ruth, Cobb decided that he was going to show that anybody could hit home runs if he chose to. On May 5, 1925, Cobb began a two-game hitting spree better than any even Ruth had unleashed. He was sitting in the dugout talking to a reporter and told him that, for the first time in his career, he was going to swing for the fences. That day, Cobb went 6 for 6, with two singles, a double, and three home runs. His 16 total bases set a new AL record. The next day he had three more hits, two of which were home runs. His single his first time up gave him 9 consecutive hits over three games. His five homers in two games tied the record set by
Cap Anson of the old Chicago NL team in 1884. Cobb wanted to show that he could hit home runs when he wanted, but simply chose not to do so. At the end of the series, 38-year-old Cobb had gone 12 for 19 with 29 total bases, and then went happily back to bunting and hitting-and-running. For his part, Ruth's attitude was that "I could have had a lifetime .600 average, but I would have had to hit them singles. The people were paying to see me hit home runs."
On August 19, 1921, in the second game of a double header against Elmer Myers of the
Boston Red Sox Cobb collected his 3,000th hit.
Cobb as player/manager
Frank Navin, the Detroit Tigers owner, signed Cobb to take over for
Hughie Jennings as manager for the 1921 season. Cobb signed the deal on his 34th birthday for $32,500. To say the least, the signing caught the baseball world off-guard. Universally disliked but a legendary player, Cobb's management style left a lot to be desired. He expected as much from his players as he gave, and most of the men did not meet his standard.
The closest he came to winning the pennant race was in 1924, when the Tigers finished six games behind the pennant-winning Washington Senators, in third place behind the Senators and Yankees. The Tigers had finished second in 1922, but were 16 games behind the Yankees.
Cobb blamed his lackluster managerial record on Navin, who was arguably an even bigger skinflint than Cobb. Navin passed up a number of quality players that Cobb wanted to add to the team. In fact, Navin had saved money by hiring Cobb to manage the team.
Also in 1922, Cobb tied a batting record set by
Wee Willie Keeler, with four five-hit games. This has since been matched by
Stan Musial,
Tony Gwynn and
Ichiro Suzuki.
At the end of 1925 Cobb was once again embroiled in a batting title race, this time with one of his teammates and players,
Harry Heilmann. In a doubleheader against the
St. Louis Browns on October 4, Heilmann got six hits, leading the Tigers to a sweep of the doubleheader and beating Cobb for the batting crown, .393 to .389. Cobb and Browns manager
George Sisler each pitched in the final game. Cobb pitched a perfect inning.
Cobb moves to Philadelphia
Cobb finally called it quits from a 22-year career as a Tiger in November 1926. He announced his retirement and headed home to Augusta, Georgia. Shortly thereafter,
Tris Speaker also retired as player-manager of the Cleveland team. The retirement of two great players at the same time sparked some interest, and it turned out that the two were coerced into retirement because of allegations of game-fixing brought about by Dutch Leonard, a former pitcher of Cobb's.
Leonard was unable to convince either
Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis or the public that the two had done anything for which they deserved to be kicked out of baseball.
Landis allowed both Cobb and Speaker to return to their original teams, but each team let them know that they were free agents and could sign with whomever they wished. Speaker signed with the
Washington Senators for 1927, Cobb with the
Philadelphia Athletics. Speaker then joined Cobb in
Philadelphia for the 1928 season. Cobb says he came back only to seek vindication and so that he could say he left baseball on his own terms.
Cobb played regularly in 1927 for a young and talented team that finished second to one of the greatest teams of all time, the 1927 Yankees, which won 110 games. He returned to Detroit to quite a welcome on May 11, 1927. Cobb doubled in his first at bat, to the cheers of Tiger fans. On July 18, 1927, Cobb became the first player to get 4,000 career hits when he doubled off former teammate Sam Gibson of the Detroit Tigers at
Navin Field.
Cobb returned again in 1928, for no real reason other than he had nothing else to do with his life. He played less frequently due to his age and the blossoming abilities of the young A's, who were again in a pennant race with the Yankees. It was against those Yankees in September that Cobb had his last at bat, a weak pop-up behind third base. He then announced his retirement, effective at the end of the season. Ironically, had he stuck with the A's in some capacity for one more year, he might have finally got his elusive
World Series ring. But it was not to be.
Post professional career
On account of his Coca-Cola deal, Cobb retired a very rich and successful man. He spent his retirement pursuing his off-season activities of hunting, golfing and fishing, full-time. He also traveled extensively, both with and without his family. His other pastime was trading stocks and bonds, increasing his immense personal wealth.
In the winter of 1930, Cobb moved into a Spanish ranch estate on Spencer Lane in the millionaire's community of Atherton outside
San Francisco. At that same time, his wife Charlie filed the first of several divorce suits. Charlie finally divorced Cobb in 1947, after 39 years of marriage, the last few of which she lived in nearby
Menlo Park.
Cobb had never had an easy time being a father and husband. His children had found him to be demanding, yet also capable of kindness and extreme warmth. "He always wanted us to work as hard as we could at anything we did," Cobb's son James told sportswriter Ira Berkow in 1969. "Just as he did." Cobb had expected his boys to be exceptional athletes, especially baseball players. Ty, Jr. flunked out of
Princeton and would have rather played
tennis than baseball, and in general was a disappointment to his father.
A personal achievement came in February, 1936, when the first
Hall of Fame election results were announced. Cobb had been named on 222 of 226 ballots, outdistancing
Babe Ruth,
Honus Wagner,
Christy Mathewson and
Walter Johnson, the only others to earn the necessary 75% of votes to be elected in that first year. His 98.2 percentage stood as the record until
Tom Seaver received 98.8% of the vote in 1992 . Those incredible results show that although many people disliked him personally, they respected the way he played and what he accomplished. In 1998,
The Sporting News ranked his as third on the list of 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
By then, Cobb drank and smoked heavily, and spent a great deal of time complaining about the collapse of baseball since the arrival of Ruth. Cobb was known to help out young players. He was instrumental in helping
Joe DiMaggio negotiate his rookie contract with the
New York Yankees, but ended his friendship with
Ted Williams when the latter suggested to him that
Rogers Hornsby was a greater hitter than Cobb.
Another bittersweet moment in Cobb's life reportedly came in the late 1940s when he and sportswriter Grantland Rice were returning from the
Masters golf tournament. Stopping at a
South Carolina liquor store, Cobb noticed that the man behind the counter was
Shoeless Joe Jackson, who had been banned from baseball almost 30 years earlier following the
Black Sox scandal. But Jackson did not appear to recognize him, and finally Cobb asked, "Don't you know me, Joe?" “Sure I know you, Ty,” replied Jackson, “but I wasn’t sure you wanted to speak to me. A lot of them don’t.”
Second marriage
At 62, Cobb remarried. The bride was 40-year-old Frances Cass. This marriage also failed, and she later filed for divorce. She felt that he was simply too difficult to get along with when he was drunk. However, Cobb counter filed and won the suit.
When two of his three sons died young, Cobb was alone, with few friends left. He therefore began to be generous with his wealth, donating $100,000 in his parents' name for his hometown of Royston to build a modern 24 bed hospital now called the Cobb Memorial Hospital. He also established the Cobb Educational Fund, which awarded scholarships to needy
Georgia students bound for college, by endowing it with a $100,000 donation in 1953.
Cobb knew that another way he could share his wealth was by having biographies written that would set the record straight and teach young players how to play.
John McCallum spent some time with Cobb to write a combination how-to and biography. He, like everyone else, found Cobb difficult at best, and impossible at worst. McCallum's book came out in 1956 and was filled with half-truths and misinformation that McCallum had never checked out.
After McCallum left, Cobb was again alone and had a longing to return to
Georgia. It was on a hunting trip near his
Lake Tahoe home that Cobb's long-range plans were going to be cut short, as he collapsed in pain and was diagnosed with
prostate cancer,
diabetes, high blood pressure and Bright's disease, a degenerative
kidney disorder. He returned to his Lake Tahoe lodge with painkillers and
bourbon to try to ease his constant pain. He did not trust his initial diagnosis, however, so he went to Georgia to seek advice from doctors he knew, and they found his prostate to be cancerous. They removed it at Emory Hospital, but that did little to help Cobb. From this point until the end of his life, Cobb criss-crossed the country, going from his lodge in Tahoe to the hospital in Georgia.
Al Stump
Al Stump, one of the most celebrated sports writers in the country at the time, was asked by Doubleday to ghostwrite Cobb's autobiography. Like John McCallum, Stump found Cobb rather difficult to work with most of the time and totally impossible when drunk. Stump's time with Cobb was "interesting," but not necessarily in a good sense. Despite the troubles, Stump stuck it out mostly because he feared Cobb's reaction if he tried to leave. From the time the two spent together we now have two books and a movie, each of which offers a slightly different point of view of Cobb's life.
A powerful moment in Stump's experience was the visit to the Cobb family mausoleum in December 1960. Cobb had used the mausoleum as an attempt to reunite his family members in death, disinterring some of them to do so. It was here that Cobb told Stump about the murder of his father, and pointed the finger at his mother. He had never spoken much about the incident, and most people at the time probably didn't even know that W.H. had been shot.
Cobb also spent much of his last few years making visits to places important to him, like the
Hall of Fame. He traveled to Cooperstown in June 1960, and lingered after-hours in the Hall, gazing at the plaques on the wall, including his own, with tears in his eyes.
By the spring of 1961, Cobb was spending most of his time at Emory Hospital for cobalt treatments to slow the spread of his cancer, which had now moved into his spine and skull. He did feel good enough to make it to spring training of the new
LA Angels in 1961, and then to his last ball game on their opening day, 1961.
The Stump autobiography came out a few months after Cobb's death, and sold well for the four years that it was in print. Despite Cobb's unpleasantness, the book painted Ty in a sympathetic light. Thirty years later, however, Stump extensively revised the book , including his own experience with Cobb and capturing the man who was so disliked by so many of his contemporaries. In 1994 the writing of the book was used as the basis for a film starring
Tommy Lee Jones as Cobb and Robert Wuhl as Stump.
Death
In his last days Cobb spent some time with the old movie comedian Joe E. Brown, talking about the choices Cobb had made in his life. He told Brown that he felt that he had made mistakes, and that he would do things differently if he could. He had played hard and lived hard all his life, and had no friends to show for it at the end, and he regretted it. Publicly, however, Cobb claimed not to have any regrets: "I've been lucky. I have no right to be regretful of what I did" .
He checked into Emory Hospital for the last time in June 1961, bringing with him a paper bag with a million or so dollars in securities and his Luger pistol. This time his first wife, Charlie, his son Jimmy and other family members came to be with him for his final days. His final day came a month later on July 17, 1961.
Cobb's funeral was perhaps the saddest event associated with Cobb. From all of baseball, the sport that he had dominated for over 20 years, baseball's only representatives in his funeral were three old players,
Ray Schalk,
Mickey Cochrane,
Nap Rucker, along with Sid Keener from the Hall of Fame. Also there were his first wife, Charlie, his two daughters, his surviving son, Jimmy, his two sons-in-law, his daughter-in-law, Mary Dunn Cobb, and her two children. The relatively sparse attendance was in great contrast to the hundreds of thousands of mourners who had turned out at
Yankee Stadium and St. Patrick's Cathedral to bid farewell to Cobb's great rival, Babe Ruth, in 1948.
In his will, Cobb left a quarter of his estate to the Cobb Educational Fund, and the rest of his reputed $11 million he distributed among his children and grandchildren. Cobb is interred in the
Royston, Georgia town cemetery.
As of 2005 the Ty Cobb Educational Foundation has distributed nearly $11 million in scholarships to needy Georgians..
Legacy
Efforts to create a Ty Cobb Memorial in Royston initially failed, primarily because most of the artifacts from his life were in Cooperstown, and the Georgia town was viewed as too remote to make a memorial worthwhile. However, on July 17, 1998, on the 37th anniversary of his death, the Ty Cobb Museum opened its doors in Royston. The time had become right to honor the man in his own hometown. On August 30, 2005, his hometown hosted a 1905 baseball game to commemorate 100 years since Ty Cobb played his first game. Players in the game included many of Ty's descendents as well as many citizens from his hometown of Royston, Georgia.
Regular season stats
| G | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | SB | CS | BB | SO | BA | OBP | SLG | TB | SH | HBP |
| 3035 | 11434 | 2246 | 4189 | 724 | 295 | 117 | 1937 | 892 | 178 | 1249 | 357 | .366 | .433 | .512 | 5854 | 295 | 94 |
References
- Charles Alexander, Ty Cobb .
- Richard Bak, Ty Cobb: His Tumultuous Life and Times .
- David Pietrusza, Matthew Silverman & Michael Gershman, ed. . Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia. Total/Sports Illustrated.
- Al Stump, Cobb: A Biography .
External links
- Baseball HoF
- Official Site
- Ty Cobb at Find-A-Grave
- Biography page
- The Baseball Page
- Ty Cobb Museum
- Fan Site
