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Ty Cobb
Ty Cobb reached the big-league Detroit Tigers in 1905 at age 18, three weeks after the death of his father. Photo: from the National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress.
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Amanda Cobb
Amanda Cobb married Ty's father when she was somewhere between the ages of 12 and 15.
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Ty Cobb with the Detroit Tigers
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Illustration by Aaron Shrewsbury.
Amanda Cobb
An accident? Self-defense? Murder? Amanda Cobb's reason for shooting remains a mystery.
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Ty Cobb Baseball Card
A baseball card from the Benjamin K. Edwards Collection, Library of Congress.
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Ty Cobb
Ty Cobb reached the big-league Detroit Tigers in 1905 at age 18, three weeks after the death of his father. Photo: from the National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress.
The world knows Ty Cobb was among the best baseball players ever, and likely the fiercest. Did what happened between his parents one night when he was 18 years old contribute to both his huge success and his bitter, uncompromising style on the field and in life?
IT'S A STORY LACKING MANY HARD DETAILS, beginning as it does in the foothills of North Georgia in 1883, when Amanda Chitwood was a 12-year-old student in a class taught by one William Herschel Cobb. Cobb at age 20 was already a respected and educated member of his community – an ambitious man of strong demeanor who would go on to be an itinerant school superintendent and a state senator.
The fact that the 20-year-old teacher apparently married his 12-year-old student that same year, on the porch of the Chitwood home, despite Amanda's father's hesitations, is the beginning of a set of circumstances and events that would violently and irrevocably alter the lives of both W.H. and Amanda, as well as of their firstborn, who would nonetheless become arguably the greatest baseball player ever, and certainly the greatest pre-home-run-era player.
One of those missing details is a verifiable date for the marriage. While nearly all sources cite 1883 and go on to note that perhaps due to the bride's young age, consummation did not take place immediately, at least one genealogical source notes 1886 as the year of the marriage.
Suffice it to say, at ages 20/12 or even 23/15, the couple was a man-and-child union (as was not uncommon in this place and in this time), not only by birthdate, but apparently also by personality, education and achievement. W.H. was patrician in appearance and accomplished in business and politics as well as education. He's described by Ty Cobb biographer Charles Alexander as "a tall, good-looking, rather bookish young man," who early on "developed the dignified, punctilious way that impressed people… in north Georgia."
Descriptions of Amanda are all but non-existent, though the word "pretty" shows up now and again. In a photo from far later in life, she appears dark-haired, well-dressed and carrying an expression somewhere between serious and deeply sad.
WHATEVER THE DATE OF THE UNION, W.H. had to move around North Georgia to find schools with enough money to pay him, and in the fall of 1886, Amanda returned to her family to prepare to bear a child. Hers was the most prosperous of the families in the unincorporated town of The Narrows in northern Banks County, as her father – Captain Caleb Chitwood – had planted several hundred acres of cotton after he returned from the Civil War.
W.H. and Amanda's son – Tyrus Raymond Cobb – arrived on December 18, 1886, soon after one of the most ferocious snowstorms ever to hit North Georgia.
Legend has it that W. H. chose the name Tyrus for his son in honor of the resistance of the city of Tyre to Alexander the Great. If a name and weather can help determine the future of a new life, then Ty Cobb might rise close to Exhibit A.
After at least several more moves to find suitable teaching jobs, W.H. settled his family to Royston, in neighboring Franklin County, where he not only found a stable school, but also purchased a farm and eventually became both mayor and the editor of the town newspaper. His status eventually led to election to the state senate, where he championed the cause of education.
At home, the professor (and by then Franklin County's first school commissioner) expected exceptional educational achievement from his children, which by 1892 included John and Florence as well as Tyrus, who was the primary focus of his father's demanding, exacting approach to child-rearing.
But young Tyrus performed only as an acceptable student, rather than the budding lawyer or doctor his father wanted him to become. The boy was also, according to biographer Alexander, "stubborn, high strung and quick tempered," traits that would become hallmarks of his life as an adult. He was a fierce competitor as a boy, no matter the context.
AS MIGHT BE seen as almost inevitable for a competitive boy in a Southern town in the 1890s, W.H.'s older son discovered the town's baseball team for younger boys, the Royston Rompers.
And one Saturday when the semi-pro Royston Reds found themselves without a shortstop, they called upon the 14-year-old to step in. In perhaps an echo of his mother's youthful start at adult undertakings, Ty Cobb had put himself in a position to earn money for playing baseball well shy of adulthood.
Addiction was immediate. Ty angered his father when he sold some of the professor's books to buy a new glove. Soon, the young, small Cobb (5'10" and 150, though he ultimately grew to 6'2", 180), was the star of the Royston Reds. By 1902, when he was not yet 16, he attended spring training for the Cleveland team of the American League.
And the following winter, when he did turn 16, the boy confided his life hopes to his mother, knowing full well that his father would not only disapprove, but likely move to prevent him from taking steps to become a professional baseball player – one of the "drunken womanizers" his father saw baseball players of the day to be (and as many indeed were). Young Ty wrote letters that winter, asking for a tryout.
He got one response, and on the day before he was to leave to try out for the Augusta (Ga.)Tourists, Ty asked his father for his blessing. The elder Cobb pleaded for his son to stay and then relented, eventually admonishing Ty to "go get it out of your system." W.H. sent Ty on his way with six checks, each in the amount of $15.
And so, in the spring of '04, at age 17, Tyrus Raymond Cobb became a professional baseball player.
THE REST, as the saying goes, is history.
Well, most of it is history in the form of amazing baseball statistics, of batting titles and stolen base records and of the first man voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, of a fierce, ruthless player and businessman who invested in Coca-Cola when it was brand new and eventually became baseball's first millionaire.
The far lesser-known piece of history is what occurred the following summer, by which time Ty was earning $125 a month and scouts were talking about the inevitability of his being called up to the Detroit Tigers of the American League: On the night of August 8, 1905, Amanda Chitwood Cobb shot and killed William Herschel Cobb.
Amanda, 33 and a wife for far more than half her life, was alone in the couple's bedroom late that night when she heard noise on the porch roof outside the bedroom – someone at the window. She got out of bed, took hold of her husband's double-barreled shotgun and approached the window. Seeing a figure against the night sky, she fired. And then she fired again.
When she walked to the shattered window, she saw her husband, lying in a pool of blood.
The misty shroud of history again hides the hard details, and instead yields several theories:
- Amanda Cobb, the most widely told version goes, had been the subject of gossip over the recent months – that she had taken a lover. Professor Cobb had told his wife he was leaving town for a few days, but then, with the younger Cobb children also away, had snuck back home around midnight to try to catch his wife with another man. A revolver was found in the jacket pocket of the dead W.H. Cobb.
- W.H. Cobb, goes a less-often-told possibility, had been out for a evening of drinking and, on a hot summer night when he had expected the windows to be open, was trying to sneak into the bedroom without being heard.
- Amanda's lover not only existed, it is speculated by some, but was in the bedroom with her, and it was he who shot Professor Cobb, with Amanda carrying his burden all her life, in an eerie echo of the murder ballad "The Long Black Veil."
No matter the details, Ty Cobb's mother was charged with shooting and killing his father. Ty Cobb, despite his difficulties in pleasing his father, nonetheless held great love and respect for him, and this "blackest of days," as he would later call it, apparently had at least two life-long effects on the young baseball player. His fire to play and to succeed took on an even more intense level as he told the co-writer of his autobiography many years later, in relation to his father: "He never got to see me play. Not one game, not an inning. But I knew he was watching me, and I never let him down. Never."
Another effect was that Ty Cobb remained distant from his mother – according to at least one source, seeing her only occasionally, and not attending her funeral in 1936.
The effects on his baseball career and personal life are more speculative, but Ty Cobb's spikes-high playing style, his complete inability to get along with teammates, managers and owners (to the extent that only three people from baseball attended his funeral), his alcoholism, his two failed marriages and estrangements from his children can all be seen to have roots in the tragic day of August 8, 1905, when he was 18 years old.
IN MORE IMMEDIATE reaction to that black night, events unfolded quickly for the Cobb family.
On August 9, Ty Cobb left the Tourists to come home to Royston and support his family.
On August 10, Amanda Cobb gave her account of what had happened to the coroner's jury and was charged with voluntary manslaughter. The trial was set for the fall.
On August 11, the gathering for the funeral of the respected and revered W.H. Cobb flowed from the Cobb house into the yard and onto the street.
On August 16, Ty Cobb rejoined to the minor-league Augusta Tourists, and three days later was informed that he had been sold to the Detroit Tigers of the American League.
On August 27 – three weeks after the death of his father and nearly half a year shy of his 19th birthday – Ty Cobb played his first major league game.
And in the fall, after the conclusion of the only season in which Ty would not carrying a batting average of at least .300, his mother's trial was postponed until the following spring.
On March 30 of 1906, Ty Cobb interrupted his spring training to travel to Lavonia, Ga., where his mother's five lawyers were squaring off against the state's four-attorney prosecution. Amanda Cobb was questioned in detail about the time between the two shotgun blasts and other specifics of that night, providing at least some contradictory testimony. But the prosecution made no mention of possible infidelity on Amanda's part, and the all-male jury found her innocent, based almost solely on her testimony that she had been awakened by what she took to be an intruder and had acted to protect herself, resulting in a horrific accident.
(Ty Cobb's five children are all deceased; efforts, through the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston, Ga., to talk to one or more of the many grandchildren about the night of August 8,1905, were met with a relayed message that the event was indeed an accident and there is no need nor inclination to talk about it further.)
TY COBB'S LIFE from that point is reflected in what pre-eminent baseball writer Bill James has characterized as the "frankly a little bit crazy" look in his eyes. James, studying countless photos, theorizes that despite his huge achievements in baseball, the north Georgia boy, in his too-big suits and coats, with his his eyes glancing furtively off to the side, never got over feeling inadequate in any setting aside from the baseball diamond. And so, when he put on the uniform, he also donned his resentment toward the rest of the world, and played like a demon in the one place he could do things better than anyone else.
Amanda Cobb's life appears to have been far less exciting after her trial. She never re-married, a fact cited by some as evidence that she was not conducting an affair at the time of the tragedy. She was a fan of Ty Cobb, but rarely attended games, and died in the fall of 1936, a few months after Ty Cobb had become the first player named to the new Baseball Hall of Fame.
The circumstances of that election are perhaps as illuminating as any of the firebrand character of Ty Cobb. By all accounts he hated Babe Ruth, the antithesis of Ty Cobb as a baseball player: Cobb was light and lithe, Ruth heavy and often out of shape. Cobb played the game at the ground level, emphasizing bunts, line drives and stolen bases; Ruth, in the middle of Cobb's career, transformed baseball as perhaps no player ever has any sport, hitting more home runs individually than teams did collectively.
Cobb hated Ruth on all levels, and took great comfort that in the first Hall of Fame balloting, he received more votes than not only Ruth, but also than the three other greatest players in the history of the game to that point in time (and those who were also in that first class): Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson.
While Cobb boycotted the ceremony, due to an ongoing feud with the commissioner, one of Cobb's sons said that his father was more proud of that Hall of Fame voting than any other baseball accomplishment.
Amanda Cobb no doubt took great comfort as well, in the last months of her life.
And perhaps his father too, looking on from afar as Ty Cobb knew he was and always would be.
The Peach and the Babe
As a native of Baltimore, where Babe Ruth was born and learned to play baseball, I of course know that he is the best baseball player who ever lived: started out as a star pitcher and then changed the game forever when the Sultan of Swat all but introduced the home run as a weapon in the 1920s, hitting more individually in a season than whole teams did.
But the case can certainly be made that the man who brought the "other" kind of offensive baseball to its fullest fruition was the game's greatest player. Ty Cobb became the Georgia Peach by hitting for a higher average, stealing more bases and scrapping for any small advantage better than anyone who came before him and nearly all after. His .366 lifetime average is still the major league record.
Cobb's general hatred of both opponents and teammates was even more intense when it came to the Babe, typifying, as the self-indulgent Yankee did, the "wrong" way to play the game.
Yet as he did with several people later in his life, Ty Cobb made peace with Babe Ruth, to the point that after their baseball careers, when both experienced estrangement from it, they undertook a golf exhibition together, which Cobb called "The Has Beens' Golf Championship of Nowhere in Particular."
The wiry, intense man and the big laughing man split the first two days' matches. Using psychology and cunning as he had in his baseball days and taking advantage of Ruth's heavy drinking the night before, Cobb took the rubber match easily. —Kurt Rheinheimer
The Ty Cobb Museum
Royston, Ga, is home to the official museum for Ty Cobb (though the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. also houses a bounty of Cobb materials and memorabilia).
The museum is open Mondays through Saturdays and also contains materials relating to Amanda and W.H. Cobb, including the transcript of Amanda's trail for the killing of her husband.
706-245-1825.
The Other Side of Ty Cobb
Often villified for everything from estrangement from his children to overt racism, from vengeful grudge-holding to living his later life as a paranoid psychotic, the first-born son of W.H. and Amanda Cobb also had traits and accomplishments on the other side of the personal ledger:
- His friends included the likes of President Warren Harding and boxer Jack Dempsey; and after their baseball careers, Cobb and his on-field antithesis Babe Ruth became friends-in-exile from the game.
- A chronic hard bargainer at contract time during his playing days, Cobb parlayed his earnings and savings into millionaire status, as stock in Coca-Cola and General Motors helped his net worth reach about $12 million.
- He used some of that wealth to send money to former players who fell on hard times, in some cases in the form of regularly arriving checks.
- In 1945, Cobb donated $100,000 to the town of Royston, Ga. to establish a hospital in his parents' name. That facility became the cornerstone of the Ty Cobb Healthcare System, which today operates hospitals in Franklin, Hart and Madison counties.
- In 1953, he established the Cobb Educational Fund, which continues to provide monies (totalling about $13 million as of last summer) for college to needy Georgia residents. —Kurt Rheinheimer