Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty

Finallya fascinating and authoritative biography of perhaps the most controversial player in baseball history Ty Cobb. Ty Cobb is baseball royalty maybe even the greatest player who ever lived. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time and when he retired in 1928 after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics he held more than ninety records. But the numbers dont tell half of Cobbs tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam one columnist wrote. When the Hall of Fame began in 1936 he was the first player voted in. But Cobb was also one of the games most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights on and off the field and was often accused of being overly aggressive. In his day even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce and fiery competitor. Because his philosophy was to create a mental hazard for the other man he had his enemies but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961 however something strange happened: his reputation morphed into that of a monstera virulent racist who also hated children and women and was in turn hated by his peers. How did this happen? Who is the real Ty Cobb? Setting the record straight Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths traveled to Georgia and Detroit and re-traced Cobbs journey from the shy son of a professor and state senator who was progressive on race for his time to Americas first true sports celebrity. In the process he tells of a life overflowing with incident and a man who cut his own path through his timesa man we thought we knew but really didnt.