At the Ty Cobb Museum, we are still learning about a complicated legend

ROYSTON, Ga. — The scorebook rests with its dark red binding, open to two pages that tell one more sliver of the mythical, perplexing and still-evolving Ty Cobb story.

The book is a beautiful piece of history, a scorebook from 1904, when Cobb played for the Anniston Noblemen of the Tennessee-Alabama League. It is the only existing detailed record of Cobb’s playing time in the league, and it is now on display at the Ty Cobb Museum in Cobb’s hometown in Royston, Ga., about 90 miles northeast of Atlanta.

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Cobb played in Anniston, Ala., in 1904, shortly after he was released from the Augusta Tourists after only two games. It was in Anniston where Cobb, then 17, continued chasing a baseball dream. His father, who wanted his son to be a doctor or lawyer, had famously told him, “Don’t come home a failure.” The scorebook contains the record of 21 home games, in which Cobb played the outfield and hit .375. After about three months in Anniston, Cobb returned to Augusta, then eventually signed with the Detroit Tigers late in the 1905 season.

There is a photocopied version of the 5-inch by 8-inch scorebook, imaged in high resolution, available for museum visitors to flip through. The original is preserved in a glass case. You can trace Cobb’s rise in the batting order and follow as the scorebook tells stories from a long-defunct baseball league.

The museum obtained this scorebook on extended loan from Birmingham, Ala., residents Tom Rivers and his daughter, Rachael Waters. The scorebook has been something of a family heirloom, passed down from Lloyd Rivers, Tom’s grandfather who was a semipro player in Anniston.

Ron Cobb, a Cobb descendant who serves on the museum board, drove to Alabama along with another museum representative to obtain the scorebook.

Interesting as it is on the surface, the scorebook also serves as a symbol for a larger story.

It was unveiled at the museum on Dec. 18, 2021, the 135th anniversary of Ty Cobb’s birth. And therein lies the incredible thing about the legacy of Ty Cobb. One hundred and thirty-five years after his birth, more than 60 years after his death and about 94 years since the conclusion of his playing career, we are still learning more about the man.

I traveled to Royston to see firsthand the place where Cobb grew up and to visit the museum that preserves his story. I came away with more knowledge — that his mother was formally acquitted of manslaughter in a trial after the shooting of Cobb’s father, that Cobb’s father was an educator, state senator and a newspaper editor, that Cobb wrote letters under fake names to sportswriter Grantland Rice, a way of garnering publicity. I came away with a renewed appreciation for Cobb’s baseball feats. He stole home 54 times, hit above .300 in 23 consecutive seasons and dominated an era like few others ever have.

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I also came away with just as many questions, a lingering fascination with a baseball ghost.

Many a writer before has tried to distill Cobb’s complexities into some sort of coherent thought, though it is not an easy task. Joe Posnanski wrote for The Athletic, “Ty Cobb works best as an extreme. That is to say, he seems of little use to us if he wasn’t the BIGGEST RACIST IN BASEBALL HISTORY or THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD MAN EVER TO WEAR BASEBALL SPIKES.” Detroit writer Anna Clark once wrote, “Cobb’s complexity has made it possible for fans to see in him whatever it is they want to see — and for writers, historians and filmmakers to emphasize the sides of Cobb they most want to present.”

The Ty Cobb Museum, which opened in 1998, exists largely to help debunk the myths and exaggerated negative perceptions of the Georgia Peach. But the fact such a place exists also, in a way, commemorates the captivating and troublesome nature of a complicated man.

The museum, manager Leah McCall says, was largely a response to the 1994 film “Cobb,” which starred Tommy Lee Jones as baseball’s earliest antihero. The movie was an exaggeration based on an exaggeration.

“The family was not real pleased with the movie,” McCall said. “Townspeople here that knew Ty, they were not pleased, the city council was not pleased. The museum came about, all of them collaborating together to come up with the museum.”

Much of the movie’s source material came from writer Al Stump’s works on Cobb. Stump, who wrote a book with Cobb near the end of Cobb’s life (“My Life in Baseball: The True Record”) and later wrote more of his own accounts on Cobb (“Cobb: A Biography”), is generally the source of the prevailing perceptions many still have of Cobb: that he was a lunatic racist, a murderer, a downright evil human being.

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Charles Leerhsen’s 2015 biography “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” corrects many of the inaccuracies and myths Stump’s works perpetuated. “Terrible Beauty” dispels the idea of Cobb as a murderer and refutes the tale of him sharpening his spikes in order to harm opposing players. The book notes Cobb descended from a long line of abolitionists and spoke in support of integrating baseball. “Terrible Beauty,” though, does not shy away from Cobb’s deep rage or violent nature. To portray him as saintly would be just as inaccurate. Rather, the book serves to create a more three-dimensional portrait of a man too often reduced to caricature.

“My allegiance is really not to Cobb, but to the truth,” Leerhsen once said.

Multiple Cobb family members serve on the museum’s board and other family members often visit town when the museum hosts any kind of event. “They’re very involved, both financially and with a physical presence here, too,” McCall said. The museum leans toward sharing the positive notes of Cobb’s life and legacy — his split-hand batting grip, his innovative sliding and bunting, the hospital he founded in rural Georgia and the scholarship fund under his name. He was a wealthy man thanks to investments in corporations such as Coca-Cola and General Motors, and he could be a generous man, as well.

The museum, too, has placards that hint at the other side of Cobb, describing him as “a snarling wildcat who cut a bloody path to baseball immortality with a take-no-prisoners style, razor-sharp spikes, iron fists and acid tongue that spared nobody, friend or foe,” and “fueled by equal parts anger, intensity, cunning, intimidation and a mean-spirited, win-at-all-costs drive that never wavered.”

The Cobb Museum is small and still feels very much like something created in the mid-to-late 1990s. But it is a treasure trove of history and memorabilia. In addition to the scorebook, there is a litany of Cobb artifacts, most donated by the family. There are Cobb’s golf clubs and a shotgun, eyeglasses and newspaper clippings, trophies and other artifacts from his playing days. The museum shares anecdotes of Cobb’s greatness and gives us more glimpses into his interests and personality.

In Royston, Cobb’s legacy still looms large over the town, still its claim to fame. McCall, the museum manager, moved to the area about 13 years ago. Her husband is a baseball coach and scout, and they have since joined a long list of Cobb historians.

“If I had any say in it,” McCall said, “I think all of the draft picks and the ones that make it to the big leagues ought to be required to come here and study Cobb, one of the older players and one of the trendsetters and someone I would call a founding father of sorts. He paved the way for a lot of things that happened today that players don’t realize.”

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You can drive through Royston — population 2,777 — and come away with a better understanding of Cobb and how this place might have shaped him. There’s a sign in town noting Royston as the home of Ty Cobb. A Cobb statue that once stood outside Atlanta’s Turner Field is now in front of the local library. And the Cobb family mausoleum, stationed inside Rose Hill Cemetery, is a haunting tourist attraction.

His accomplishments and his legend, his goodwill and his sins and his mysteries, all help to preserve the legacy of Tyrus Raymond Cobb.

(Top photo: Transcendental Graphics / Getty Images)

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