Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview
  • Ty Cobb

  • The Life and Legacy of the Player Who Set the Most Major League Baseball Records
  • By: Charles River Editors
  • Narrated by: Bill Hare
  • Length: 1 hr and 17 mins

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Ty Cobb

By: Charles River Editors
Narrated by: Bill Hare
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £6.99

Buy Now for £6.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

"I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch." (Ty Cobb)

"Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit." (Babe Ruth)

As one of America's oldest and most beloved sports, baseball has long been touted as the national pastime, but of all the millions of people who have played it over the last few centuries, few have influenced Major League Baseball like Ty Cobb, whose career spanned over 20 seasons. The Georgia Peach overcame early hardships to set nearly 100 MLB records in his time as a player and player-manager for the Detroit Tigers and Philadelphia Athletics. With an MVP and Triple Crown under his belt by the age of 25, Cobb went on to produce statistics that still lead MLB in several categories, including 4,065 combined runs scored and RBIs, a career batting average over .365, and at least 11 batting titles. In cases where he's no longer the record holder, it would take decades for players like Pete Rose to play in more games and collect more at bats and hits, for Rickey Henderson to score as many runs, and for Lou Brock to steal more bases.

Even Americans who are relatively unfamiliar with baseball's storied history have likely heard of Ty Cobb and can recognize him as one of the sport's all time greats, but today his legacy is better known for controversy. In his day, Cobb was cast as a villain by fans of teams he played against, but he was portrayed in flattering manners shortly after his death. Things changed when other contemporary accounts came out and cast him as a vile racist, among other personal failings, much of which can be credited to the writing of sportswriter Al Stump and the modern biopic Cobb, released in 1994. It has only been recently that modern historians have pushed back a bit on those portrayals of Cobb and attempted to depict him in a more balanced light, and even then some of them have struggled. For example, in The Journal of American Culture, writer Hunter M. Hampton noted that biographer Charles Leerhsen's Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, released in 2015, "succeeds in debunking the myth of Cobb that Stump created, but...spawned a new myth by conflating Stump's shortcomings to depict Cobb as an egalitarian".

Ty Cobb: The Life and Legacy of the Player Who Set the Most Major League Baseball Records profiles the controversial legend, both on the field and off it. You will learn about Ty Cobb like never before."

©2019 Charles River Editors (P)2020 Charles River Editors
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Fall from Grace cover art
The Called Shot cover art
How to Beat a Broken Game cover art
Lou Gehrig cover art
Casey Stengel cover art
Willie Mays cover art
The Hall: A Celebration of Baseball's Greats cover art
Yogi cover art
Great Australian Cricket Achievers and Characters cover art
A Game of Extremes cover art
The Three Lives of the Kaiser cover art
The Ultimate Yankee Book cover art
Collision of Wills: Johnny Unitas, Don Shula, and the Rise of the Modern NFL cover art
Tales from the Deadball Era cover art
Pinstripe Empire cover art
Baseball cover art

What listeners say about Ty Cobb

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.