A Terrible Beauty

The Record

A student of the game. Not the monster they sold.

Drawn from Charles Leerhsen’s Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Leerhsen went back to the newspapers and letters of Cobb’s own day. The later legend made a cartoon. The record is sterner, and smaller.

“The Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly.”

Leerhsen does not wash him clean. Cobb was high-strung. He fought, on the field and off it. His mother shot his father the month the boy reached Detroit. Teammates hazed the bibliophile who packed Les Misérables. What the book takes off the statue is the later varnish: sharpened spikes as a habit, a cartoon racist. Warts, Leerhsen said. Not tumors.

Twenty-two seasons in a Detroit uniform, 1905 to 1926 — then two years in Philadelphia. In Woodbridge he kept a duplex at 4117 Commonwealth, a walk down Trumbull to Bennett Park. He also used the Pontchartrain Hotel, and later Boston-Edison. Winters, Georgia. Detroit was the work.

The close is not a retired number. In 1950 Cobb Memorial Hospital opened in Royston on his hundred-thousand-dollar gift, named for his parents — a hospital built with a bat, still a hospital. In 1953 he started the Ty Cobb Educational Fund, scholarships for Georgia students, still paid. The Ty Cobb Museum on Cook Street is still open. That is the legacy.

The pictures never did his character justice. Ron Shelton’s Cobb (1994), after Al Stump, with Tommy Lee Jones, sold the monster. Field of Dreams had Shoeless Joe say Cobb wanted to play — they told him to stick it. Leerhsen’s newspapers do not match those scripts. We do not use Stump as a source. We name the films that copied him.

• 22

  Tiger seasons

• .366

  Career average

• 12

  Batting titles

• 4,189

  Hits

• 897

  Stolen bases

• 54

  Steals of home

• 1950

  Cobb Memorial Hospital

• 1953

  Educational Fund

The Card

T206, shown actual size.

The White Border set — collectors call it The Monster — was printed to fit a cigarette pack. Cobb appears in four poses. This is Portrait–Red, 1-7/16 by 2-5/8 inches. A modern card is drawn around it at 2½ by 3½.

Modern 2½ × 3½

T206 at true size — 1-7/16" × 2-5/8". Tap the card for the reverse.

Issued

1909–1911

Catalog

T206 White Border

Size

1-7/16" × 2-5/8"

Metric

36.5 × 66.7 mm

Cut

±1/16" typical

Stock

Thin cardboard, pack-fit

Print

Color lithograph

Type

Dark brown caption

This pose

Portrait–Red

Cobb in set

4 poses

Subjects

524

Issuer

American Tobacco Co.

• Portrait, red background — this card
• Portrait, green background
• Bat on shoulder
• Bat off shoulder

Caption ink is dark brown, not black. Cutting was by hand, so unaltered cards wander about a sixteenth of an inch. The reverse shown is a reconstruction of the common Piedmont 350 advertisement — brand never appeared on the front.