But all he wanted to do was earn a few bucks to help his mother, Luronie Gillis Reliford, who was raising 10 children on her own while suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. Joe, her ninth child, was four when his father, Roscoe Reliford, died.

“I had to do something to help her, had to make a little money,” Reliford says. “I was 10 years old when I walked up to the manager of the Fitzgerald Pioneers, Ace Adams, and asked him if I could be their batboy.”

Adams, who’d been an All-Star relief pitcher with the New York Giants during World War II, took one look at the 4-foot-11, 68-pound kid and “did everything he could to discourage me,” Reliford recalls. “He told me how the batboy would have to keep up with all the bats and balls, shine all the players’ shoes, travel with the team. It was a lot of work.”

There was another pro club in Fitzgerald at the time: the Lucky Stars, part of a minor Negro League. They weren’t hiring, but the all-white Pioneers were. Reliford grew up watching both. He says he watched Satchel Paige—a big-leaguer at the time—pitch in Fitzgerald after the major-league campaign.

The Pioneers, meanwhile, restricted their paying African American fans to a section along the right-field line in Blue Gray Park. Reliford remembers perching in trees outside the park to catch glimpses of practice and games.

“I just loved baseball, and I badly needed that job,” Reliford says. “I kept at Mr. Adams and he finally gave in.” Joe remembers that the job paid $68 every two weeks—more than a lot of grown men in South Georgia were making at the time (an article at Baseball-Reference.com claims his biweekly salary was $48).

Reliford was all of 12 years old and in his third season as the Pioneers’ batboy that historic night in 1952. He was the only African American wearing a Fitzgerald uniform and one of the few black people in packed Pilots Field, where the hometown Statesboro Pilots were clobbering their visitors, 13–0, on Elks Night. Both teams, playing well below .500 ball, were battling for fourth place in the eight-team circuit.

“That ballpark was full—5,000, maybe 6,000 people—and they started yelling, ‘put the batboy in,’” Reliford, now 70, says. “Every time they saw me grab a bat, they’d yell like that. They were beating us really bad, and the crowd was just rubbing it in.”

In the top of the eighth inning, Charlie Ridgeway, an infielder who took on managerial duties during some road trips, had a “what the hell” moment. He followed the crowd’s advice. He decided to insert Reliford, by now barely 90 pounds soaking wet, as a pinch hitter for right fielder Ray Nichting, the Pioneers’ best hitter, who was batting around .330 at the time and leading the team in RBI.

“I was having a good year. But we’re getting killed, and Charlie asks me, ‘Do you care if I let Joe bat for you?’ I didn’t have a problem with it,” says Nichting, who now lives near Cincinnati.

Reliford, Nichting, Ridgeway, and the rest of the Pioneers knew something the crowd didn’t: the kid could play. “He was a great athlete. But it was a different time, down in South Georgia.

They thought it was a big joke, this scrawny, young black kid, the batboy,” says Nichting, who played two years of pro ball before getting drafted and deployed to Korea. He fought on Pork Chop Hill and lost a leg. After the war, he redirected his baseball IQ into Little League, twice taking his teams to the World Series. 

“Joe would take batting practice, pitch batting practice, warm up pitchers, shag fly balls. Stuff like that,” Nichting recalls. “A real good kid, and he worked his butt off for us.” 

So Ridgeway, who died in 2008, told the homeplate umpire, Ed Kusick, that he was putting Reliford— who wasn’t on the Fitzgerald roster—into the game, with the understanding that if the kid got a hit, the Pioneers would forfeit the game. Reliford feebly protested, but Ridgeway was insistent. 

“I grabbed a bat and went out there to hit, and that really revved up the crowd,” says Reliford, who now lives in Douglas, Georgia, about 30 miles from Fitzgerald. “I’ll never forget it, like this was yesterday. Their pitcher was Curtis White, and I figured he was gonna throw the ball to me like I was a child. I was a child.” 

White, working on a two-hitter that night, was Statesboro’s ace and one of the league’s top pitchers that year, posting an ERA of 2.63 with a 16–11 record. He was just as surprised to see the batboy step into the batter’s box as Reliford was to see a fastball zip past him. “He pitched to me like I was Mickey Mantle up there, threw it hard! And I got angry,” Reliford says, laughing. “I thought he was trying to show me up, and I told myself that I’d hit the next one out of the park.” He did hit the next pitch, lining a sharp grounder down the third-base line. But the third baseman backhanded it and threw Reliford out by a step. 

In the bottom of the eighth, after White had retired Fitzgerald, Ridgeway told Reliford to grab a glove and go to right field. “I thought he was kidding,” Reliford says. “I told him, ‘Mr. Ridgeway, we can’t do this!’ But he just said, ‘Go ahead, get out there. Everything’s gonna be all right.’” 

Better than all right. The Pilots put a man on first with one out in their half of the inning. “The next man hit a grounder to right, a base hit, and the man on first tore around second and went for third,” Reliford recalls. “He must have figured I was just some little kid. Well, I had a rifle arm, and that ball was waiting for him at third.” 

The next batter was Harold Shuster, who was working on a 21-game hitting streak but had gone hitless in Statesboro’s offensive onslaught. He would knock in 100 runs that year and lead Statesboro with a .339 batting average. A right-handed hitter, Shuster sliced a drive to deep right, but Reliford flagged it down at the fence. “That kid picked it off like a champion,” Nichting says. 

That’s when the place went nuts. The fans came pouring out of the stands toward Reliford. Consider the scene: it’s 1952 in segregated South Georgia, and this 12-year-old kid, still numb after playing an inning of baseball with and against hardened professionals, sees a mob of white people running at him. 

“All those white folks came straight at me, and I was so scared I shut my eyes and expected the worst,” Reliford says. “I didn’t know they just wanted to congratulate me.” The fans clapped him on the back and stuffed his pockets full of money. The game was forfeited to Statesboro, and Reliford’s greatest moments on a ball field were behind him. The league suspended Ridgeway, fined him $50, and fired Kusick, the umpire. At the end of the season, the club also dismissed Reliford. 

Joe Reliford joined the Lucky Stars for a while, and the team tried to capitalize on his new-found fame as baseball’s youngest professional. He got into a few games, but his career didn’t last. Reliford went on to become a four-star athlete at Monitor High School. He had a number of scholarship offers from historically black colleges and chose to play football at Florida A&M. But he broke his collarbone in practice, ending his playing career. 

Reliford says he gave New York a short try after college but only lasted a few months. Otherwise, he’s spent his entire life in South Georgia and has lived in Douglas with his wife Gwendolyn, a schoolteacher, for more than forty years. Reliford worked for years as a jukebox repairman, served as a police officer in Douglas for a time, coached football and basketball at the local high school for African American students, and served a term as city commissioner. 

His achievement that hot July night 58 years ago has been recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records and on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not television program. In 1991, his record also earned him inclusion in the National Baseball Museum, which erected a display honoring his accomplishment, and he spun the growing awareness of his record into a book, From Batboy to the Hall of Fame. Reliford says he recently signed a contract with a movie producer for a big screen treatment of his story. 

He’s made occasional appearances the past few years, throwing out honorary first pitches at big-league parks and signing autographs. He doesn’t charge a dime for his signature. “My wife might charge you, but I won’t,” Reliford says. “As long as God gives me the strength to write my name, I won’t charge for my autograph.” 

The kid who loved baseball, the poor kid who only wanted to make a few bucks to help his family, unwittingly became famous and put his name on a record that probably won’t be broken. 

“That one inning of ball made me a celebrity,” Reliford says. “They put me in as kind of a joke, and that joke got turned around and became a blessing for me.” 

JERRY GRILLO writes for “Georgia Trend” magazine. He has directed the play “Cobb” and is writing a book about his son Joey, a Special Olympian who plays for the Josh’s Heroes baseball club.

Notes

This article is based primarily on telephone interviews with Joe Reliford (May 2009, July 2009, and February 2010) and Ray Nichting (August 2009). Other sources consulted: Georgia Trend (March 2003), Minorleaguebaseball.com, Associated Press (May 1995), JockBio.com, and BaseballReference.com.

On September 21, 1954, the Atlanta Crackers, champions of the Double A Southern Association, and the Houston Buffaloes, champions of the Double A Texas League, squared off in Atlanta’s venerable Ponce de Leon Park in the first game of the 32nd annual Dixie Series, the South’s version of the World Series.1 Houston finished the regular season in second place one game out of first and then defeated Oklahoma City (4 games to 1) and Fort Worth (4 games to 1) in the playoffs to earn the honor of competing for the championship of Southern baseball.

For the Crackers something more—something much more—than becoming the undisputed champion of Southern baseball was at stake in the Dixie Series. Atlanta had already captured three of the four prestigious events its league offered. The Crackers won the annual All-Star Game 9–1, finished first in the regular-season standings two games ahead of New Orleans, and had then defeated Memphis (4 games to 2) and New Orleans (4 games to 1) to take the playoffs. A victory in the Dixie Series would give the Crackers a clean sweep of everything the Southern Association offered, allowing the club to join the 1938 Crackers as the only teams in history to win the Southern Association grand slam.2

Offensively, the Houston ball club led the Texas League in runs scored, hits, total bases, stolen bases (by a huge margin), RBI, and batting average. The Buffaloes also grounded into the league’s fewest double plays.3 The everyday lineup boasted six players who batted more than .300. Houston finished last in the league in home runs, but the team had remedied this deficiency with the late-season acquisition of former Negro League slugger Willard “Home Run” Brown.4 Playing for Dallas and Houston, he batted .314 with 35 home runs and 120 RBI. Brown, an outfielder, and “the Killer B’s,” three future major-league starters, first baseman Bob “The Rope” Boyd (.321, 7, 63), third baseman Ken Boyer (.319, 21, 116, and 29 SB), and shortstop Don Blasingame (.315, 5, 53, and 34 SB), drove Houston’s potent attack.

Houston’s four starting pitchers were Willard Schmidt (18–5, 3.69 ERA), Hisel Patrick (10–3, 3.77 ERA), Luis Arroyo (8–3, 2.35 ERA), and Hugh Sooter (14–13, 3.28 ERA). Among league pitchers with 10 or more decisions, Schmidt led in winning percentage, Patrick was second, and Arroyo was fifth. Schmidt, a power pitcher, finished third in the league in strikeouts with 186, and Arroyo, a screwball specialist, fanned 130 in only 115 innings. Arroyo, promoted to Houston in the middle of the season from the Class A Sally League, pitched the only no-hitter in the Texas League in 1954. Houston’s ace reliever was future major leaguer Bob Tiefenauer, a knuckleball pitcher. According to Houston Post sportswriter Clark Nealan, Tiefenauer preserved many small leads during the season and was indispensable to the success of the Buffaloes.5

Atlanta’s offense depended on the power hitting of its outfielders, Bob Montag (.305, 39, 105) and future major leaguers Pete Whisenant (.285, 20, 94) and Chuck Tanner (.323, 20, 101). When one of them hit a home run, the Crackers usually won the game.6 Montag’s 39 home runs were second in the league and set an Atlanta franchise record for most circuit clouts in a season. He led the association in walks with 122 and in on-base percentage at .450. He also led the league in strikeouts with 121. Montag was third in the circuit with 293 total bases and second in slugging percentage at .648. Tanner was second in the league in total bases with 311 and second in hits with 192.7 Second baseman Frank DiPrima (.316, 12, 68) and first baseman Frank Torre (.294, 9, 74) also contributed to the Cracker attack. They, especially Torre, anchored the infield defense. Torre played 112 consecutive games and handled his first 1,006 chances before making an error, establishing two Southern Association records for defensive excellence.8 Longtime Atlanta sportswriter Ed Danforth described him in one of his regular columns as the finest fielding first baseman in the history of the Southern Association.9

For most of the season, Atlanta had only two reliable starting pitchers, Leo Cristante (24–7, 3.59 ERA) and Dick Donovan (18–8, 2.69 ERA), a future major league star. Cristante led the league in victories by a wide margin and in winning percentage. Donovan, who did not join the team until mid-May, when the Detroit Tigers returned him to Atlanta, was second in the league in ERA and tied for second in the league in wins. Once the moody and capricious Donovan had learned to control his volatile temper on the mound and added the slider to his repertoire, he became the best pitcher in the league.10 In the final two months of the season, Donovan compiled a stellar record of 11 wins against only two losses. He won many crucial games for the Crackers, and the Atlanta sportswriters frequently referred to him as the team’s “money pitcher.”11 His teammates recognized his contributions to their success when they selected him as the club’s most valuable player.12

In late July, the Crackers acquired a third dependable starting pitcher when Triple A Toledo sent the team Glenn Thompson. When he joined the Crackers, the 6′ 5″ Thompson had a blazing fastball but little control. He stumbled in his first four starts with the Crackers, winning one and losing three with 15 walks in 20 innings and an ERA of 5.40. Then in mid-August he harnessed his speed, and for the final few weeks of the season, he overpowered Southern Association hitters. In a game against New Orleans, he used his fastball to fan 19 batters, establishing a Southern Association record for most strikeouts by a pitcher in a nine-inning game.13 In his last five starts of the regular season, Thompson pitched five complete games, went 5–0, gave up only 34 hits and eight runs, and struck out 49 batters.

Atlanta’s fourth starting pitching slot rotated among Bob Giggie, Bill George, Dick Kelly, and Virgil Jester. None of them pitched well consistently. They combined for 68 starts during the season, compiling a mediocre record of 25 wins and 27 losses. The team’s top relief pitcher was another future major-league star, Don McMahon. In 46 appearances (all but one in relief), he hurled 91 innings, struck out 90 batters, and won eight and lost five with a 3.56 ERA.

Jim Solt’s lone hit in the 1954 Dixie Series was one of the most memorable in Atlanta Crackers history. (DENNIS GOLDSTEIN COLLECTION)

As a team, Atlanta was greater than the sum of its individual parts. At catcher the Crackers had an excellent platoon, with the right-handed hitter Jim Solt and the left-handed hitter Jack Parks. Almost always batting in the lower third of the order, they combined to hit 17 home runs, drive in 84 runs, score 68 runs, and bat .317.14 Billy Porter, the starting shortstop, was equally adept at third base. Donovan was both a star pitcher and an excellent hitter. He pinch-hit regularly, and he even started a few games in the outfield to take advantage of his powerful bat. In 114 regular-season at-bats, he hit .307 with 32 RBI and 17 extra base hits, including 12 home runs, which tied a league record for most homers in a season by a pitcher.15

The two most versatile players on the team were super utility man Paul Rambone and Earl “Junior” Wooten. The fiery and tempestuous Rambone appeared in 133 games and accumulated 481 at-bats without having a regular position. On numerous occasions, he played more than one position during the same game. For the season, Rambone played 82 games at shortstop and 25 games at both third and second base. He also played both corner-outfield positions, first base, and even catcher. At the plate, Rambone contributed 89 runs scored and 52 extra base hits, including 19 home runs.

Wooten, the club’s elder statesman and leading comedian,16 had played with the Washington Senators in 1947 and 1948 and had already spent a decade in the Southern Association. The decline of his offensive skills precluded him from a starting berth on the team, but he remained a superb defensive first baseman and outfielder.17 When he substituted for the slick-fielding Frank Torre at first base, the Crackers lost very little defensively. When Wooten replaced the weak-fielding and weak-throwing Montag in the late innings of close games, his most frequent role on the club, the Crackers had the best defensive outfield in the league: Whisenant in left, Wooten in center, and Tanner in right.18 Wooten also pitched in emergency situations, pitched batting practice regularly, coached first base, and managed the team whenever manager Whitlow Wyatt was unavailable.

The 1954 Dixie Series was full of irony.19 Atlanta made history at the beginning of the season when it integrated its team and its league. The Crackers broke the color line in the venerable, tradition-rich Southern Association when outfielder Nat Peeples, a former Negro League player, made the team’s opening-day roster. Peeples appeared in the first game of the season, playing in Mobile, Alabama, as a pinch hitter. He started the next game in left field. Two days later, he returned to Atlanta to open the home season. But before he played in a regular-season game in Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park, the Crackers demoted him to Jacksonville, in the Class A South Atlantic League. Peeples never again played in the Southern Association. He was the first and only African American to play in the league.20

Houston also integrated its team in 1954. In the middle of the season, the club purchased the contract of first baseman Bob Boyd, another former Negro Leaguer, from the Chicago White Sox, and later the team acquired Willard Brown from the Dallas Eagles of the Texas League. Houston manager Dixie Walker attributed much of the team’s success to Boyd and Brown, who became extremely popular with Houston fans, who affectionately nicknamed them Mr. Boom and Mr. Bam.21 So even though the Crackers had integrated at the beginning of the season, when Boyd and Brown played in the opening contest of the Dixie Series on September 21, 1954, they became the first African Americans to play in an official game at Ponce de Leon Park.22

The 1954 Dixie Series was more than just a championship playoff between competing teams and leagues. It also formed the backdrop to an intense personal drama and rivalry between the two managers, Houston’s Dixie Walker and Atlanta’s Whitlow Wyatt. They had been teammates for six years with the Brooklyn Dodgers, including the pennant-winning 1941 squad. The two men were also the closest of friends. Almost immediately after Earl Mann, the Crackers’ owner, hired Walker to manage the 1950 Atlanta Crackers, Walker lured Wyatt out of retirement to serve as his pitching coach and chief assistant. Together, they led the 1950 Crackers to a Southern Association pennant. They remained at the helm of the Crackers for two more years, finishing sixth in 1951 and second in 1952.23 Collaborators no longer, they now confronted each other as the fiercest of rivals.

Even before either Houston or Atlanta had won their leagues’ playoffs, Clark Nealon, sports editor of the Houston Post, yearned for a Walker-Wyatt showdown in the Dixie Series. In his regular column, Nealon wrote: “Should the Buffs make it to the Dixie Series, nothing would please Manager Walker more than for Atlanta to win the Southern Association playoff.”24 The Atlanta papers also relished the personal confrontation between the two managers brewing in the upcoming Dixie Series. Two days before the first game, an anonymous author wrote in the Atlanta Journal: “As the Texas League season sizzled to a stop, Walker envisioned a triumphant return to Atlanta, scene of his first managerial assignment in 1950. It’s no secret that the soft-spoken Alabaman yearns to send his Buffs against his old club, now managed by Wyatt, a former Brooklyn teammate. He wired Whit his personal congratulations immediately after Atlanta clinched its playoff berth. Plainly, a Houston-AtlantaWalker-Wyatt series would have immense appeal for all concerned.”25

The editorial boards of both Atlanta papers made the dramatic, personal rivalry between Walker and Wyatt the central theme of the upcoming games. According to the editors of the Atlanta Journal: “For the first time in many years, there will be a real rivalry between Atlanta and the Texas League champion. Houston is managed by Dixie Walker, late of the Crackers. And of course Walker’s former assistant, manager Whit Wyatt, now leads Atlanta.”26

On the day of the first game of the Dixie Series, the Atlanta Constitution editorial board wrote: “Technically it is Atlanta versus Houston and the Southern Association versus the Texas League for the championship of the whole wide South. Locally it is all that and something more. Houston’s boss is Dixie Walker, formerly the manager of the Crackers. Whitlow Wyatt, who has piloted Atlanta through a great season, was Walker’s assistant when he was in Atlanta. When an ex-hero returns to his old home stand as an enemy, there’s more at stake than just prestige, and usually there’s blood in more than one pair of eyes. . . . It’s not only a matter of winning the Dixie, but stomping old Dixie while we’re at it.”27

Even the Constitution’s editorial cartoonist, Clifford Baldowski, got caught up in the drama of the Walker-Wyatt showdown. His cartoon of September 22, 1954, appropriately titled, “When Old Friends Get Together,” shows Walker and Wyatt soaring high above Ponce de Leon Park tenaciously clutching the 1954 Dixie Series pennant while they clobber each other with baseball bats.28

1954 Atlanta Crackers (COURTESY OF KENNETH FENSTER)

On September 20 and 21, Crackers owner Earl Mann placed large ads on the first page of the Constitution’s sports section, promoting the first two games of the Dixie Series. Game time was 8:15 P.M. Box seats cost $2.60; grandstand seats a more modest $1.85; bleachers went for $1.25. Children could sit in the grandstand and the bleachers for $1.00 and $0.50, respectively. Patrons could purchase tickets at the Ponce de Leon box office or at Muse’s clothing store in downtown Atlanta. A large but not sell-out crowd of 11,495 attended the first game of the Dixie Series on September 21, a balmy Tuesday night.29

The game drew the largest African American attendance of the season to Ponce de Leon Park, and the Negro grandstand and bleachers overflowed with a standing-room-only crowd. Blacks also flocked in great numbers to Game 2 of the series. They came not to watch the Crackers but to see and cheer Houston’s two African American players.30

Houston won the first two games of the series convincingly. The Buffaloes took the opener 10–4. Left-hander Luis Arroyo hurled a complete game and gave up only seven hits. The Killer B’s had three extra-base hits, scored five runs, and drove in three. Outfielder Fred McAlister hit a long three-run homer in the sixth inning to put the contest out of reach. Houston trounced the Crackers in the second game, 7–2.

Willard Schmidt gave a masterful pitching performance, and the Killer B’s continued their hot hitting with two more extra-base hits, four runs scored, and two driven in. In both games, Atlanta’s pitching collapsed. Glenn Thompson started the first game and lasted less than two innings, yielding five hits and four runs. He and five other Atlanta pitchers walked 11 batters. In the second game, Leo Cristante surrendered seven hits and five runs in two innings. Schmidt limited the Crackers to two hits and none after the second inning. He struck out 11 batters in the game that he, his catcher, and his manager agreed was his best outing of the year.31

In these two contests, the Buffaloes outperformed the Crackers—whom Houston sportswriter John Hollis described as “listless”—in every facet of the game.32 Houston’s vastly superior speed impressed the sportswriters from both cities as that team’s single greatest advantage over Atlanta. In both games, Houston dazzled Atlanta with its aggressiveness on the bases. The Buffaloes took the extra base on hits to the outfield, stretching singles into doubles and doubles into triples. Twice Houston scored on wild pitches.

The highlight of the team’s running attack was Bob Boyd’s “ridiculously easy steal of home” in Game 2. As Atlanta left hander Bill George went into an elaborate windup, Boyd dashed for home from third. He was already three-fourths of the way to the plate before the Cracker hurler had even released the ball. The ball arrived so late that catcher Jack Parks made no effort to tag the sliding Boyd.33 Houston’s daring base running reminded Atlanta sportswriter Bob Christian of the Gas House Gang, and Whitlow Wyatt pondered quizzically: “Those guys fly, don’t they?”34 Because of Houston’s speed, Ed Danforth wrote in his regular column that Atlanta could not win the series and should surrender. He asserted:

On what they showed here, Dixie Walker’s club could have won the Southern Association pennant by 10 games. No club in our league was nearly that fast. . . . On speed alone, Houston would have run our league ragged. . . . Bob Boyd . . . can outrun any of the Crackers or the [New Orleans] Pelicans. . . . The way they [the Buffaloes] took out after the Crackers in the first three innings it looked as if the best strategy was to pull the light switch and start all over again. Whitlow Wyatt has a game club with a lot of power, but beside this Houston crew they were wearing gum boots. . . . When this Dixie Series came up they [the Crackers] ran into a club that was just too good for them. They must be given “A” for effort, but to insist on pinning the shoulders of that fast-breaking Houston club is asking too much.35

The Crackers and Earl Mann, however, remained optimistic. When the team left for Houston for the next three scheduled games, the marquee at Ponce de Leon Park read, “Atlanta vs. Houston, September 27th.”36

The series now shifted to Houston’s Buffalo Stadium, where Houston had not lost a three-game series since July.37 Down two games to none, the Crackers faced a must-win situation in Game 3. Behind the team’s year-long reliables, Dick Donovan and Bob Montag, Atlanta defeated the Buffaloes 7–4. Donovan pitched a complete game and contributed with his bat, collecting two hits, a walk, two RBI, and one run scored. Atlanta banged out 13 hits, more than the team’s combined total in the first two games.

For the first time in the series, the Crackers scored first, plating two runs in the third inning on Rambone’s double, Donovan’s walk, Porter’s sacrifice, and Torre’s single. Three times during the game, Houston came from behind to tie the score, with the Killer B’s doing most of the damage. They scored three runs and knocked in two more. Then in the eighth inning, Montag hit a solo home run that put the Crackers ahead for good.

The key play in the game came in the bottom of the ninth inning. With the score 7–4, the left-handed Earl Wooten went into the game to play center field as a defensive replacement for Montag. Regular center fielder Whisenant moved to left field, and Montag, the starting left fielder, came out of the game. Wyatt had used this strategy in the late innings of close games frequently during the season, and never was the move more important than in this game.

With one out and a runner on first base, Houston outfielder George Lerchen, a left-handed hitter, smashed a terrific slicing line drive headed for deep left-center field. Wooten had shaded Lerchen toward right field, so he was a long way from the ball. Being left-handed gave Wooten a crucial advantage in making the play.

He explained: “I remember that ball. It went out and I thought I could catch it all the way. I did. I ran toward left field. Yes I did, because that’s the one that my glove hand is on, that side. That gave me a little more leverage over on my right side. I had my glove on my right hand, so I ran toward left field and that helped a lot. When the ball came off the bat, I thought I had it all the way.”38

The sportswriters from both cities lavished effusive praise on Wooten’s catch. Dick Freeman of the Houston Chronicle described it as “one of the best fielding plays ever seen in Buff stadium.” Jesse Outlar of the Atlanta Constitution called it “a miracle catch. . . . No one thought Wooten could make the catch—but he did—a sensational diving, one-handed stab.” And according to Atlanta sportswriter Bob Christian, when Lerchen hit the ball, “Wooten took off like a coyote and never gave up on it. When he saw he might not catch it, he made a long, diving effort and caught the ball. He rolled over a couple of times, but still got up in time to keep the runner from advancing. That was the ball game. The crowd began to jam the exits.” Christian ranked this catch “as the best ever in the Southern Classic.”39

1954 Houston Buffalos (COURTESY OF KENNETH FENSTER)

In Game 4, after Atlanta starting pitcher Dick Kelly faced three batters and gave up three hits and one run, Wyatt replaced him with Bob Giggie, who held the Buffaloes scoreless for the rest of the frame. The Crackers plated two runs in the third inning to take the lead. Houston tied the game in the bottom half of the third on Bob Boyd’s solo home run and then scored three runs in the sixth off Atlanta’s ace relief pitcher, Don McMahon, to win the game 5–2. The Killer B’s scored all of Houston’s runs, had four RBI, and stole three bases. In the first three innings, Atlanta left six men on base, wasting several opportunities to score. In the last six innings, Atlanta had only two hits, both meaningless singles. With Houston now enjoying a commanding three-to-one lead in the series and with Arroyo and Schmidt available to pitch Games Five and Six, Atlanta sportswriter Jesse Outlar was ready to concede defeat.40

Game 5 featured a rematch of Game 1’s starting pitchers, Luis Arroyo for Houston and Glenn Thompson for Atlanta. The Crackers scored the only run of the game in the first inning when Wooten raced across the plate on Pete Whisenant’s broken-bat, bloop single.41 Thompson, so ineffective in Game 1, pitched brilliantly, using his blazing fastball to overpower the hard-hitting Buffaloes. He yielded a measly three hits—two to Killer B Bob Boyd—and he struck out 11. Thompson allowed only two Houston runners to reach as far as second base.

The Atlanta pitcher got into trouble only once in the game. In the bottom of the eighth, he walked the number-eight hitter to start the inning. After a wild pitch advanced the runner to second base, Thompson walked the pitcher. With Houston having the potential winning run on base and the top of the order coming to bat, the Crackers faced imminent elimination.

But Thompson remained poised and responded to this pressure-packed situation with great clutch hurling. Houston leadoff hitter Don Blasingame bunted Thompson’s first two pitches foul. The Atlanta pitcher ran the count full and then induced Blasingame to hit a weak pop-up to shortstop. Thompson also went to a full count on the next batter, second baseman Howard Phillips, a .306 hitter during the season, and then struck him out. The third hitter in the Buff lineup was the dangerous Ken Boyer.

With the raucous, partisan crowd cheering louder for Boyer on every pitch, Thompson ran the count full yet again. Then Thompson retired Boyer on a long but harmless fly to Pete Whisenant in left field. Jesse Outlar thought Thompson’s performance was the best in the history of the Dixie Series, and Earl Mann believed it was the finest he had seen in his entire 25-year career as a minor-league executive.42

With the victory in this tension-filled must-win game, the Crackers forced the series to return to Ponce de Leon Park for at least one more contest. Sunday, September 26 was an off day. Game 6 was scheduled for Monday night, and Game 7, if necessary, would be played on Tuesday. Thompson’s sensational victory pumped new life into the team, and the Crackers were confident they could win the next two games.

The players spent the off day relaxing at a steak dinner Earl Mann gave them at Aunt Fanny’s Cabin, a popular Atlanta restaurant. Dick Donovan, known for his gregarious, fun-loving ways and good sense of humor off the mound, came to the banquet unconcerned about his scheduled start in the upcoming crucial Game 6 of the series.43 He and his pal and roommate Bill George wore big cowboy hats, chomped on fat cigars, and lived it up.44

Houston also anticipated victory. In fact, the Buffaloes arrived in Atlanta on Sunday so confident that they would win Game 6 and thus the series that they made hotel reservations for only that night. They checked out of their rooms prior to coming to the ballpark on Monday, convinced that the Crackers would not force a Game 7.45 Such hubris— so reminiscent of ancient Greek tragedy—rarely goes unpunished.

When Atlanta took the field to start Game 6, the crowd of 10,447 gave the team a tremendous ovation. The Crackers did not disappoint their fans. Starting pitcher Dick Donovan, whom Bob Christian christened immediately after the game as “the greatest thing in Atlanta since sliced bread,” pitched and hit the Crackers to a 6–2 triumph and a tie in the series at three victories apiece.46 The Atlanta pitcher, according to Christian, brought to the game an indomitable will to win. Donovan attributed the victory to the effectiveness of his slider.47 He hurled a complete game, giving up only seven hits and shutting down the Killer B’s, limiting Houston’s most dangerous hitters to three hits in 13 at-bats, no runs scored, and one RBI. Donovan struck out eight and walked only one, and that was an intentional pass. At bat, Donovan had a double, was hit by a pitch, and scored both times he reached base.

The Crackers rallied against Houston’s ace pitcher, Willard Schmidt, in the fourth inning to plate five runs and overcome a one-run deficit. Third baseman Vern Petty, who had seen very little playing time since suffering a freak off-the-field injury48 in mid-August, delivered a key blow in the inning, a two-run double. As Petty pulled into second base and catcher Jack Parks and Donovan crossed the plate to give the Crackers a one-run lead, the large crowd cheered loud and long. Later in the inning, Pete Whisenant drove in two more runs with a triple to right field. With this sizeable lead, Donovan coasted the rest of the way.

After the game, the Houston players stoically filed into their locker room and then went back to their hotel, where they had to re-register for rooms. The Crackers had spoiled their plans for an early return home. The Crackers stormed their locker room full of joy and jubilation. They chanted, “Sixty instead of forty!”—a reference to the percentage of the first four games’ gate receipts that the players on the winning and losing teams received for the series.49 Paul Rambone shrieked, “It belongs to the Crackers!” Leo Cristante shouted, “We’re just getting warmed up.” Billy Porter was ready to “take on the winners of the Little World Series. Then on to Cleveland.”50

This pandemonium quickly gave way to a quiet confidence and a sense of purpose, and the players calmed down and focused on the upcoming Game 7. One observer commented, “What’s the funeral about in here? I thought these guys won something.”51 Whitlow Wyatt explained this abrupt change of mood in the clubhouse: “They’re just like that. They’re not the hollering, screaming type. They can get as worked up as anybody about a ball game, but it comes out on the field. They don’t use it up until they have to. They’ve been great that way. I guess that’s the reason they’ve won.”52 The players showered, dressed, and went home. On his way out, Bob Montag confided to Atlanta sportswriter Furman Bisher: “We got it now. We got it.”53

The Crackers, so moribund in the first two contests, had rallied from a one-to-three game deficit to knot the series at three victories apiece. During the regular season, Atlanta had staged numerous comebacks to win. In late August, trailing the league-leading New Orleans Pelicans by two games, the Crackers swept the Pelicans in a four-game series to zoom into first place and to take the pennant. In both rounds of the league playoffs, the Crackers lost the opening game and then defeated their opponents. The team had one more game to play for dollars and glory. Could the Crackers come from behind one more time to win the Dixie Series and the Southern Association grand slam?

On Tuesday, September 28, a long line of people waited at the Ponce de Leon box office to buy tickets for Game 7.54 When the gates at Poncey opened at 4:50 P.M. for the 8:15 P.M. game, more than 100 people had already queued up to enter the ballpark. By 6:00 P.M., fans had taken every parking space within several blocks of Ponce de Leon Park. At 7:15 P.M. they had filled every seat in the grandstand. A large, exultant throng of 13,293 fans, the third largest of the season, jammed every nook and cranny of the place to cheer the Crackers to what they hoped would be their third straight victory.

An uproarious excitement and sense of anticipation pervaded Ponce de Leon Park. “People were sitting on soft drink crates behind the last row of grandstand seats. Others were on the rail behind them. They were practically hanging from the rafters. They overflowed into the left field section behind the fence. And there was a good crowd perched on the fence beside the railroad tracks.”55

Glenn Thompson’s masterful performance in Game 5 of the 1954 Dixie Series was the best of his career. (DENNIS GOLDSTEIN COLLECTION)

In the game, Glenn Thompson, working on only two days’ rest, started on the mound for Atlanta against Houston’s Hugh Sooter, the winner of Game 4. The Buffaloes jumped off to an early lead. Believing that the left-handed batter Don Blasingame would not pull Thompson’s fastball, the Cracker outfielders swung around toward left field. Blasingame led off the game with a pop-up down the right-field line that fell in between Frank DiPrima, Frank Torre, and Chuck Tanner. The speedy Buff shortstop raced to third base for a triple, sliding in ahead of the throw.

The next hitter, Howard Phillips, lofted a long sacrifice fly to left field that scored Blasingame. Thompson retired the next two hitters, Boyer and Brown. In the second inning, Houston threatened again, putting runners on first and second base with no outs, but Thompson then struck out the next three batters. Houston had runners at first and third with one out in the third inning but again failed to score, with Thompson getting Brown and Boyd out on weak infield grounders.

Atlanta finally got on the scoreboard in the fourth inning. Chuck Tanner led off with a single. The next batter, Bob Montag, powered a triple to right field, scoring Tanner and tying the game. Pete Whisenant then hit a routine ground ball to shortstop. Montag—in what could have been a serious base-running blunder—broke for home. He got caught in a rundown. Montag, a fast runner and a big man at 185 pounds, charged the plate standing upright. He slammed into Hugh Sooter at home with the full force of his body, jarring the ball out of the Houston pitcher’s glove. Montag’s run gave the Crackers a 2–1 lead. Meanwhile, Whisenant had raced all the way to third base. After DiPrima grounded out, Jack Parks hit a sacrifice fly to deep center field, driving in Whisenant for Atlanta’s third and final run of the inning.

In the bottom of the fifth inning, Glenn Thompson led off with a single. After Vern Petty grounded into a force out, Frank Torre blasted a ground-rule double, putting Crackers on second and third base with one out and a two-run lead.

At this point in the game, the wheels of managerial strategy began to whirl. Dixie Walker replaced Sooter, a right hander, with Luis Arroyo, a lefty, to pitch to Atlanta’s two left-handed sluggers, Chuck Tanner and Bob Montag. Arroyo intentionally walked Tanner to bring up Montag with the bases loaded. The crucial moment in the game and the series had arrived. If Houston could prevent the Crackers from scoring, the momentum in the game would revert to the Buffaloes. If Montag, the Crackers’ best and most reliable power hitter, could drive in one or more runs, he could put the game out of reach.

As Montag, who had struggled all season against left-handed pitching, approached the batter’s box, Whitlow Wyatt pondered pinch-hitting for his slugger. As Wyatt explained immediately after the game: “I was thinking about it all the time, all the time he was walking to the plate. I was afraid Dixie might take out his left-hander and that would leave me with a right-handed lineup. . . . I looked over at first base and saw Chuck [Tanner] and Earl [Wooten in the first-base coach’s box.] I could tell they seemed to think it was time for a pinch hitter. . . . Then I decided that two runs right there might mean the game. . . . That’s when I sent for [Jim] Solt.”56

The fans in the stands rained a unanimous chorus of boos on Wyatt for his decision to pinch-hit the righthanded Jim Solt for Montag. In the press box, Atlanta Journal sportswriter Rex Edmondson moaned, “Whitlow has lost his mind!”57 At this point in the series, Solt was 0 for 9. But then Edmondson realized that Montag—despite his power—was vulnerable to lefthanded pitching. Edmondson also remembered that Solt, in a similar pressure-packed situation, had pinch-hit a three-run homer to win the game that gave Atlanta the honor of hosting the 1954 All-Star Game.58

Jim Solt drove Arroyo’s first pitch over the 350-foot left-field fence for a grand-slam home run. When Solt’s bat made contact with the ball, sending it soaring beyond the infield, Dixie Walker, who was standing on the dugout steps, dropped his head to his chest, shaking. The moment Solt hit it, Walker knew it was out of the park and that the game and the series had ended for the Buffaloes.59

Solt’s teammates mobbed him at home plate, and the crowd was delirious. Atlanta sportswriter Rex Edmondson had “never . . . been on the scene more unforgettable. I wasn’t in the Polo Grounds when Bobby Thomson’s blast beat the Dodgers in ’51, but I was listening and even then . . . although I was jumping with joy, it didn’t match that night at Ponce de Leon when Solt’s homer cleared the left field fence. I don’t recall how long it took Solt to cross home plate as fans and players streamed out to greet him. It was pure bedlam.”60

With a 7–1 lead, Glenn Thompson coasted the rest of the way. He got stronger as the game progressed, retiring the last 20 men he faced. The big Atlanta hurler turned in his second brilliant pitching performance in four days. He limited Houston to five hits. He struck out six and walked only two. When the Buffaloes came to bat in the top of the ninth inning, the park organist, Mrs. Johnnie Nutting, serenaded them with “I’m Heading for the Last Roundup.”

When the game ended, the jubilant Crackers hoisted a beaming Whitlow Wyatt onto their shoulders and carried him to the clubhouse. The Cracker “dressing room . . . was a bedlam. A turmoil. Like Lindbergh coming home from Paris. V-J Day.”61 Earl Mann and Charlie Hurth, the president of the Southern Association, joined the celebration, congratulating Wyatt and the players. Mann gave Thompson a bear hug and a headlock. A forlorn Dixie Walker was there too. He came to congratulate his former teammate, his former collaborator, and his friend. Wyatt told Walker, “It’s bad trying to beat your best friend, but you were trying to beat me.”62

Even after the victory and amid this joyous celebration, some of the players were amazed at what they had just accomplished. Dazed and stupefied, they sat nearly motionless, in various stages of undress. Frank DiPrima perched on a table wearing only his unbuttoned undershirt. Leo Cristante had on nothing but his undershorts. Relief pitcher Pete Modica, who had played sparingly in the series, rested on a bench, shirtless, smoking a cigarette. And Montag, one of the heroes of the game, sat on a rubbing table wearing nothing at all.

Earl Mann, who had won 10 pennants in his minor-league career, called the victory in the seventh game of the 1954 Dixie Series “the biggest thrill I’ve ever gotten out of baseball.”63 The 1954 Atlanta Crackers— their dramatic finishes and thrilling come-from-behind victories, Whitlow Wyatt’s leadership, Montag’s home runs, Thompson’s nearly flawless pitching, Donovan’s brilliant hurling and his prowess at bat, and Solt’s pinch-hit grand slam—are all part of Atlanta’s baseball legacy and the stuff of legend and lore. The 1954 Atlanta Crackers won the Southern Association grand slam in storybook fashion. Their victory was, as Rex Edmondson put it, “The Miracle of Ponce de Leon.”64

KEN FENSTER is professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College, Clarkston Campus. His baseball writing has appeared in “Nine”, “The New Georgia Encyclopedia”, “The African American National Biography”, and “The Baseball Research Journal”. He currently is researching the life of Atlanta Cracker executive Earl Mann.

FACTS AND FIGURES ON THE 1954 DIXIE SERIES

Gate Receipts

$130,367.05 divided as follows:

$20,576.40 for the Atlanta players

$13,723.99 for the Houston players

$34,996.64 for each club

$13,036.69 for each league65

Notes

No two accounts of the events were identical. In fact, the Atlanta Constitution concluded from the number of versions in circulation that imagination was the clear victor over veracity. Picking up a report from the Waynesboro Citizen on October 31, the Constitution explained: “We have been able to learn very few reliable facts concerning the terrible tragedy which occurred near McBean on last Sunday. We have seen twenty or more statements in the public prints, all of which probably contain some facts, but none of them can be correct, and we deem them all the statements of the rumors of the hours. We do not care to give these rumors currency, as we feel satisfied that none of them are correct, and may bias the public mind.”1

Most accounts agree that Thomas Syms, a spectator, insulted Rufus McNorrell, one of the players, at the Saturday baseball game. Both sides then showed up at the Hardscrabble Church on Sunday afternoon. From what occurred, both sides must have been armed, although that conclusion was disputed at the time. One contingent consisted of Thomas Syms and his two sons, Frank and Duff. McNorrell’s group included John M. Rodgers, T. Britton Rodgers, Warren Rodgers, and John Cox. While it is clear that McNorrell had been insulted at the ballgame, it is unclear whether Thomas Syms had slapped him in the face on Saturday at the game or on Sunday, when the two groups met outside the church.

Beyond that, the matter of who did what and to whom becomes even more confused. However, there is no doubt that Thomas Syms was killed at the scene, while Frank and Duff Syms were wounded, Frank fatally. Britt Rodgers was shot in the face but survived. The five members of the Rodgers side then rode into Waynesboro, the county seat, and “voluntarily delivered themselves to the sheriff.”2

Newspaper reports described the participants as well-to-do farmers belonging to respectable families. Both sides promptly employed lawyers, Judge H. D. D. Twiggs by the Rodgers side and the firm of Foster and Lamar by the Syms side. In due time T. Britton Rodgers and Rufus McNorrell were charged with murder and tried in the Superior Court of Burke County.3

During the trial, a female witness who had seen the affair from a church window testified that she had not been frightened by the shooting. In closing arguments, Judge Twiggs, representing the defense and known for his great oratorical ability, used her statement to support a disquisition on the bravery of Southern women, including a story about a general who envisioned his wife at his side during the fighting at Gettysburg. Twiggs’ presentation was so vivid and dramatic that one of the jurors delivered a Rebel yell. The trial judge promptly held the juror in contempt of court but later remitted the $10 fine.4

The jury deliberated just half an hour before acquitting Rodgers and McNorrell. Whether that verdict was a reflection of the views of a segment of society that still considered firearms a proper recourse in affairs of honor, a tribute to Twiggs’ eloquence, or simply an acknowledgment that no one knew what had really happened must remain a mystery.5

RICHARD MCBANE, a retired newspaperman, is the author of “Glory Days: The Akron Yankees of the Middle Atlantic League, 1935–1941” (Summit County Historical Society, 1997), and “A Fine-Looking Lot of Ball Tossers: The Remarkable Akrons of 1881” (McFarland, 2005).

Notes

Introduction

In his December 29, 2005 internet blog, John Thorn, the noted baseball author and SABR member, mentioned that the shotgun that killed Ty Cobb’s father in 1905 had been part of the famous Barry Halper collection of baseball memorabilia—an incredible, if not unbelievable, assertion.1 How could such an artifact of tragedy have survived for 100 years to become part of the most famous collection of baseball memorabilia ever assembled? And more importantly, why?

As a lifelong fan of Ty Cobb (but not a descendant or close relative) and a member of the Board of Advisors to the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston, Georgia, I was fascinated by these questions when I discovered Thorn’s blog in mid-2006. A discussion among the museum board members resulted in an e-mail to John Thorn, seeking further information about his assertion and about the relic itself. This exchange digressed quickly into a disagreement as to whether a pistol or a shotgun had actually been used in the incident that took William Herschel Cobb’s life, and Thorn declined to discuss his statement further.2

A few months later, the Ty Cobb Museum received a phone call from a representative of the New York Yankees organization, inquiring about the shotgun that was used to kill Ty Cobb’s father.3 The caller, who identified herself only as a member of the Yankees’ marketing department, wanted to know if the museum had any information that could be used to confirm that a shotgun, which the caller said was now held in the collection of an undisclosed Yankee player, was actually the weapon that had been used in the shooting of W. H. Cobb.

These two events inspired me to begin a thorough investigation to review all of the information that could be located about the August 8, 1905, shooting of Ty Cobb’s father at the hand of Ty’s mother. I wanted, once and for all, to either confirm or disprove the shotgun element of this tragic event in Ty Cobb’s life story. And, if disproved, I wanted to identify and understand the source of this particularly distasteful part of the myth. An unintended result of this investigation has been to provide new insights into other myths about Georgia’s most famous baseball player—where they began and how they grew. This investigation also demonstrates that new information to be found in the realm of high-end baseball memorabilia, often well known among collectors and authenticators but not widely publicized, can be highly relevant to the efforts of baseball researchers and historians.

THE SHOTGUN

The first step in my investigation was to review the Sotheby’s catalog for the 1999 sale of the Barry Halper Collection, which had netted something over $20,000.000.4 This unindexed, three-volume set, which provides descriptions, some photos, and the realized prices of the auctioned items, is practically a baseball history in itself and would be an interesting read for any SABR member. My first perusal, however, yielded no information on the Cobb shotgun.

Recalling that I had once read that Major League Baseball had purchased about 20 percent of the Halper collection before the auction and donated it to the Cooperstown Hall of Fame Museum, I asked friend and research director Tim Wiles if the Cobb shotgun was among the Halper items that had been received by the Hall of Fame. His reply a few days later was that no such item was in their collection and that he and his colleagues could not imagine that the Hall of Fame Museum would ever accept such a sordid relic were it to be offered.5

A subsequent e-mail exchange with Robert Lifson, the memorabilia expert who managed the auction of the Halper collection for Sotheby’s, revealed that the John Thorn blog had indeed been correct.6 The Cobb shotgun had been listed in the Sotheby’s auction catalog. This discovery prompted my second review of the Halper catalogs, in which I found this description on page 439 of volume 1, with no accompanying photo:

1227 Ty Cobb’s Shotgun . . .

“Tyrus R. Cobb” is engraved near the trigger of this early twentieth-century double-barrel shotgun. Cobb’s biographer Al Stump told Barry Halper that this was the gun that Mrs. Cobb used to shoot Mr. Cobb, when Ty was still young. The younger Cobb kept the gun throughout his life and used it on many of his hunting expeditions.7

Lifson also replied that the shotgun originally was to be included in the auction and thus had been included in the catalog, but that ultimately it had been rejected because the only provenance was Al Stump’s statement. There was also a question as to whether Sotheby’s was licensed to auction such a firearm.8 The shotgun, as lot 1227, did not appear in the published prices realized list, confirming Robert Lifson’s recollection that it had been pulled from the auction.

According to the Sotheby’s catalog, the source of the shotgun in the Halper collection was sportswriter Al Stump, who had collaborated with Ty Cobb on his 1961 autobiography and during that process spent time with Cobb in the last year of his life. I was to later learn that Al Stump was very well known to experts and collectors of high-priced baseball memorabilia. But some obvious questions remained.

Why would Ty Cobb, who according to all accounts had been deeply and permanently affected by the untimely death of his beloved father at the hand of his mother, have kept the shotgun supposedly used in the tragedy for the rest of his life? Why would he have used this weapon in many of his later hunting expeditions? Indeed, why would he have had his own name inscribed on the weapon?

Exhibit 1. A copy of an excerpt from the Atlanta Journal (August 11, 1905), article quoting Amanda Cobb’s statement to the jury of the coroner’s inquest. Amanda testified that she fired two shots from a pistol that her husband had bought for her. No newspaper or court records have been found that dispute her testimony. She also testified that Clifford Ginn was first to assist her and made no mention of Joe Cunningham having been the first to arrive on the scene.

THE RECORD

The August 8, 1905, death of William Herschel Cobb, a former Georgia state senator, Franklin County school board commissioner, and owner and editor of The Royston Record, was widely covered in newspapers throughout the state. All discovered contemporary news articles that provided details of the shooting death of W. H. Cobb and the subsequent trial of his wife, Amanda Cobb, referred to the weapon used in the shooting as a revolver or pistol. The August 11, 1905 Atlanta Constitution includes this description of Amanda Cobb’s testimony before the coroner’s jury: “When she heard a noise at the window during the night, she took a revolver from the reading table where she had left it and fired two shots at a figure crouching outside.” Mrs. Cobb’s full testimony before the coroner’s jury was included in the same article (see exhibit 1).9 A diligent online search by researchers at the State of Georgia Archives discovered numerous other newspaper articles available digitally and some legal documents from the Franklin County court records.10 The weekly Macon Telegraph carried this description of Amanda Cobb’s testimony on September 28, 1905: “According to a statement made by her soon after the shooting she was roused in the night by someone at her window. She rose quickly, and with a revolver fired at a crouching form. Then she screamed.”11

Several articles in The State (Columbia, South Carolina), the Savannah Tribune, and the Augusta Chronicle covered the 1905 coroner’s jury and the March 1906 trial but failed to mention the weapon used.12

The Superior Court records found online at the State of Georgia Archives include the 1905 criminal docket, the 1905 application for bail, and the 1906 jury verdict, none of which make any reference to the weapon used in the shooting. In a 2004 SABR Deadball Committee e-mail group dialogue, some of these newspaper articles casting doubt on the shotgun theory were presented and discussed. From the ensuing e-mails, the consensus conclusion seemed to be that these documents were insufficient to dispel the well-known and long-accepted “fact” that a shotgun had been used in the shooting death of W. H. Cobb. The principal argument was that press coverage would have been friendly, even lenient, toward Mrs. Cobb, due to the prominence of W. H. Cobb and the entire family.13

This conclusion is contradicted by a close reading of the articles, which reveals that the coverage was in fact harsh, even discussing rumors of infidelity and the revelation that W. H. Cobb had a revolver and rock in his coat pocket at the time of his death, which served to heighten the speculation about this sensational case.

The court itself was hardly lenient on Amanda Cobb. Not until September 29, 1905, did the court grant her request for bail, requiring a $10,000 bond “with good security,” an extremely large sum in 1905.14 When the trial finally began on March 30, 1906, the court denied a motion for continuance requested by Amanda Cobb on the grounds of the absence of a principal defense witness. Still further, in 1907, after being acquitted, Amanda Cobb had to file suit against the administrator of her late husband’s estate, forcing a division and sale of lands in order for her to receive the “twelve-months support” for her family as provided by Georgia law.

A notable result from this exhaustive search of the record is the absence of any mention whatsoever of a shotgun in the press coverage or in the surviving Superior Court records. To conclude as a result of this study that a handgun was used in the shooting death of W. H. Cobb, against the widely held belief that a shotgun as used, would hardly be unreasonable. However, as described above, it is doubtful that such a conclusion would be widely accepted, even among the SABR community.

To finally conclude that the shotgun story is false, a more compelling piece of evidence is required. Thanks to the research of Wesley Fricks, also a board member at the Ty Cobb Museum, such a document has been discovered.15 The official Franklin County coroner’s report, dated August 9, 1905, which served as the arrest warrant for Amanda Cobb, states clearly and unequivocally that a pistol was used by Amanda Cobb and that the death of W. H. Cobb resulted from a pistol bullet. Ecce signum! (See exhibit 2.)

Exhibit 2. A copy of the coroner’s report and arrest warrant for Amanda Cobb, issued August 9, 1905, by the Franklin County coroner. The coroner concluded, based on his examination of the body of the deceased W. H. Cobb and on the sworn oaths of witnesses, that the death was a result of a bullet wound from a pistol fired by Amanda Cobb.

THE SHOTGUN STORY

Having proven the shotgun story false, my investigation turned to an interesting and obvious question: what is the origin of this sensational and widely believed story that Ty Cobb’s mother killed his father with a shotgun? I completed a thorough review of the biographical literature on Ty Cobb in a search for the answer.

Sverre Braathen’s 1928 biography Ty Cobb: The Idol of Baseball Fandom,16 did not mention the death of Ty Cobb’s father at all. Ty Cobb’s 1925 autobiography, My Twenty Years in Baseball,17 also fails to mention his father’s death, as does H. G. Salsinger’s 1951 Sporting News biography.18

Gene Schoor’s 1952 biography, The Story of Ty Cobb: Baseball’s Greatest Player, stated only that W. H. Cobb was shot and killed “under circumstances which were clouded, in an atmosphere of enigma and cloaked in mystery.”19 John D. McCallum’s 1956 biography, The Tiger Wore Spikes, was essentially a juvenile biography and provided no specific details about the shooting incident. It did, however, state that W. H. Cobb was killed by a “bullet,” which indicates that a handgun, not a shotgun, was the weapon used, since a shotgun shoots “shot” or “pellets,” not “bullets.” This wording is consistent with the coroner’s report in the use of the term “bullet,” but McCallum makes no mention of having seen that report.20

Cobb’s 1961 autobiography, My Life in Baseball: The True Record, written in collaboration with Al Stump, states only that his father had been killed in a gun accident. No details were provided.21

Shortly after Ty Cobb’s death in July 1961 and the release of Cobb’s autobiography, Al Stump wrote an article for True Magazine titled “Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight to Live.”22 This article is the first recounting of the shotgun story in the literature that was reviewed in this investigation. It will be examined in detail in the following sections.

In 1975, John D. McCallum expanded his earlier 1956 book and published the first detailed Cobb biography, titled simply Ty Cobb. McCallum devotes a full chapter to describing the details of the shooting incident, even including supposed dialogue between Amanda Cobb and Clifford Ginn, a boy who lived nearby who had come to the Cobb house upon hearing the shots and then had gone upstairs to the bedroom where Amanda Cobb stood in shock. Amanda Cobb’s testimony in 1906 was that she had summoned Clifford Ginn to come over. This chapter also included three lengthy quotations from articles in The Royston Record that ran in the days following the incident. In this 1975 biography, McCallum leaves no doubt that he believed the weapon that killed W. H. Cobb was a pistol. Within this chapter, McCallum states that Amanda “took a pistol out of a drawer”; that Amanda “clutched the pistol between her hands”; that Amanda “stood there clutching a smoking pistol”; and that she had “instinctively reached for her pistol, which she always kept on her nightstand alongside her bed when she was alone nights.” McCallum also states that “one gossip said it was a shotgun, while another said it was a revolver.” McCallum was thus familiar with the shotgun story, and he apparently dismissed it completely.23

Robert Rubin’s 1978 juvenile biography Ty Cobb, the Greatest mentions only that Ty Cobb’s father “had been shot to death by his mother, who mistook him for a prowler.”24

In 1984, Charles Alexander wrote a detailed biography of Ty Cobb, also titled simply Ty Cobb. In it he relates the shotgun story in much the same way that it appeared in Al Stump’s 1961 True Magazine article. Alexander describes the incident as the “bizarre and ghastly” death of Cobb’s father from two shots from a shotgun, with an intervening time interval between the shots. He also states that Joe Cunningham was the first person to come to the Cobb residence and identify the slain intruder as W. H. Cobb and then quotes Joe Cunningham’s daughter as stating that her father had said that the sight of W. H. Cobb’s body was “the worst thing I ever saw”: he viewed a “gaping hole in the abdomen” and Cobb’s “brains literally blown out.”25

Since its publication, Alexander’s biography has become the nearest thing to the definitive biography of Ty Cobb. It was written by a professional historian and university professor and is presented as scholarly, comprehensively researched, and uncontroversial. It is thoroughly indexed and references a wide variety of sources. It is generally recognized as complete and, more important, unbiased. It is not without errors, however, such as the statement that W. H. Cobb had married Amanda Cobb when she was only 12 years old, an assertion that probably adds to the sensationalism of the shotgun story. Her actual age was 15, a not uncommon age for marriage at the time, as is clearly shown by examination of the available census and marriage records.26

For the next 20 years, all of Cobb’s biographers, including Richard Bak (in both his 199427 and 200528 biographies), Norman Macht (1992),29 S. A. Kramer (1995),30 Patrick Creevy (fictionalized biography, 2002),31 and Dan Holmes (2004),32 relate the shotgun version of the shooting story. Their shotgun stories vary only in the level of detail presented.

Included also is Al Stump’s 1994 biography Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball, which amplified and expanded on the 1961 Ty Cobb autobiography on which Stump collaborated. This biography also included a slightly rewritten and expanded version of Stump’s 1961 True Magazine article. Stump prefaces this book by stating that he had lacked editorial control over the 1961 Cobb autobiography, asserting that what Cobb had allowed into the book was self-serving and implying that this new book would correct the omissions of the earlier work. Stump retells the shotgun story along the same lines as his 1961 article, describing how Amanda “grabbed up a twin-barreled shotgun from a corner rack in the room and in fright fired one load” and then, panic stricken, had “screamed and triggered a second blast. . . . She could barely identify the body of her husband. From the neck up not much was left.”33

Tom Stanton’s 2007 book Ty and the Babe, which focuses principally on the post-career relationship of the two megastars, mentions the shooting only in passing, without providing any details.34

Don Rhodes, a long-time reporter for the Augusta Chronicle, wrote Ty Cobb: Safe at Home in 2008. Rhodes quotes extensively from the 1905 and 1906 articles that were printed in the Chronicle, taking advantage of the full archives of the Chronicle that were available to him.35 He quotes liberally from the “innuendo filled articles” published by the Chronicle, including one that relates Amanda Cobb’s testimony about using her pistol in the incident. He does not mention the shotgun story.

Based on this review of the available biographical literature on Ty Cobb, no account of the shotgun story is found prior to Al Stump’s 1961 True Magazine article. With the exception of John McCallum’s 1975 book and Don Rhodes’ 2008 book, every biography and every article written since 1961 that made mention of the weapon used in the shooting of W. H. Cobb has accepted and retold in one form or another this now-disproved shotgun story.

THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE SHOTGUN STORY

Ty Cobb’s autobiography was released shortly after his death in July 1961. In December, Al Stump turned to True, The Man’s Magazine to publish his article “Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight to Live.” True Magazine was a leader at the time in the men’s adventure genre, which featured lurid covers and provocative titles that oversold allegedly true stories that were usually fictional or mostly so. Besides the “true stories” of war, demented rulers, love-starved Amazons, and so on, magazines in this genre often included pin-up photos, love-life articles, and exposés of vice in cities throughout the world. These often near-pornographic magazines were nevertheless sold openly at newsstands and drug stores—thus the provocative titles and covers to “hook” the macho-male population.

The cover of the December 1961 issue showed a full-color photo of four ornate and deadly swords as a lead-in to an article titled “They Live by the Sword.” The cover byline for that issue trumpeted Al Stump’s article with: “Exclusive! The Strange, Wild, Tragic End of Ty Cobb.” Among the other articles in this issue were: “Psychic: The Story of Peter Hurkos,” who was world famous for using ESP to solve baffling crimes; “Daring Dive for Derelict Gold,” about the salvaging of sunken treasure in a deadly minefield of World War II ordinance; and “The Monster Makers,” describing various natural-born and intentionally-mutilated human freaks of the Middle Ages, with grotesquely drawn illustrations. “Men’s adventure” is definitely not the genre from which scholars and historians usually seek truthful, insightful, and unembellished information about anyone or anything. Nevertheless, this is where the Cobb shotgun story began.

In the 1961 True Magazine article, Stump has Ty Cobb confess, as they visit the Royston, Georgia, tomb of his father and mother, that “my father had his head blown off with a shotgun when I was 18 years old— by a member of my own family. I didn’t get over that. I’ve never gotten over that.” Later in the article, Stump quotes “family sources and old Georgia friends of the baseball idol” as being his source for the story. He describes the shooting event simply by saying that Amanda Cobb “kept a shotgun handy by her bed and used it.” In this version of the story, he has the shooting occur inside the Cobb house, by placing Amanda in the bedroom “all alone when she saw a menacing figure climb through her window and approach her bed. In the dark she assumed it to be a robber.”

Among the many sports-related articles written by Stump, this was by far the most successful of his career and the most widely read. It received several awards and was later reprinted in two editions of True Magazine Baseball Yearbook (1962 and 1969),36 in the resurrected Baseball Magazine in 1965,37 and in the Third Fireside Book of Baseball.38

THE SOURCE OF THE SHOTGUN STORY

In 1994, an ill and aging Al Stump wrote Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball. This book went much farther than the earlier Cobb autobiography, adding details that Stump said had been withheld by Cobb in the 1961 autobiography. It also included an expanded version of Stump’s 1961 True Magazine article, which had achieved prominent recognition in sports literature over the years. This book was subsequently made into a movie titled Cobb, directed by Ron Shelton. The movie was a commercial flop that received mixed reviews, grossed less than $850,000, and was pulled from domestic theaters just weeks after its opening.39

Unlike his True Magazine article, in the 1994 book Stump identified his source for the details of the shooting of W. H. Cobb as Joe Cunningham, the childhood friend and next-door neighbor of Ty Cobb in Royston. Stump provides several quotations attributed to Cunningham detailing not only the circumstances of the shooting but also Ty’s physical and mental reaction to the tragedy.

It is impossible that Al Stump ever had any interaction with Joe Cunningham. Stump never had occasion to be in Royston, with or without Ty Cobb, prior to the 1960 collaboration on Cobb’s autobiography. Joe Cunningham died in 1956.40 The quotations were therefore fabricated to enhance the believability of his story. Possibly, Stump’s information came from interactions with Cunningham’s daughter, Susie, who was still alive in 1960 and who had been interviewed and quoted by biographer Charles Alexander for his 1984 book. Or Stump could have fabricated this dialogue based solely on Alexander’s 1984 biography.

The question naturally arises about Joe Cunningham, who, either directly as falsely asserted by Stump or indirectly as asserted by Charles Alexander, was the source of the shotgun story: If he was the first to arrive at the scene of the shooting, why was he not mentioned prominently in the widespread newspaper coverage of the incident and in the subsequent trials? If he was the first to arrive on the scene of the shooting, why was there no challenge to Amanda Cobb’s court testimony that Clifford Ginn, her brother-in-law, was first to arrive? This type of controversy, if it occurred, would have been widely reported in the press, which sensationalized practically every other aspect of the incident. Yet there is no mention of Cunningham in any of the articles or other records that I was able to locate, and thus there is no evidence that Cunningham had even the smallest part in the shooting tragedy or its aftermath.

There are no clear answers to these questions for several reasons, first among them being that neither Stump nor Alexander had any direct interaction with Joe Cunningham. In Stump’s case, the story was either fabricated, obtained at second hand from Cunningham’s daughter, or copied and expanded from Alexander’s 1984 biography. In Alexander’s case, as he points out, it came second-hand as a family story from Cunningham’s daughter, and is highly suspect for this reason alone.

A recent interview with noted Atlanta sportswriter and editor Furman Bisher clouds the veracity of the Cunningham story even further.41 Bisher knew Ty Cobb well, having written a widely-read 1953 article which addressed the death of W. H. Cobb and an in-depth Saturday Evening Post article about Cobb’s return to Georgia in 1958. Bisher stated in this recent interview that he also knew Joe Cunningham well and had spoken to him on several occasions. Furman Bisher stated that Joe Cunningham had told him directly in the early 1950s that Amanda Cobb was not the one who shot W. H. Cobb but that the shots had been fired by her paramour when they were caught together by Professor Cobb after he returned home unexpectedly. However, Susie Cunningham Bond, Joe Cunningham’s daughter and Alexander’s source, told writer Leigh Montville in 1982 that “her father did not think another man shot Ty’s father, that Amanda Chitwood Cobb did, indeed, pull the trigger, and that Amanda knew who her target was.”42 These conflicting stories from Cunningham and his family about what Cunningham did and did not believe cast serious doubt on the truth of anything sourced to Joe Cunningham or his family. More likely, Joe Cunningham, who lived his entire life in the small town of Royston and became the town undertaker, found an outlet in his old age for foggy or perhaps fantasized recollections about the town’s most famous citizen and recounted differing versions of the story to family and to visiting sportswriters and historians.

WHO WAS AL STUMP?

Alvin J. Stump was born in 1916 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was raised in the Pacific Northwest, attended the University of Washington, and shortly after graduation landed his first reporter’s job at the Portland Oregonian. Following a stint as a correspondent in the wartime Navy, he settled in Southern California and worked as a freelance writer.43

Prior to beginning his collaboration with Ty Cobb in 1960, Stump had written many sports-related articles on the lives and careers of other notables, including Mel Ott, Bob Lemon, Gil McDougald, Ralph Kiner, Eddie Mathews, Duke Snider, Jackie Jensen and Jack Harshman.44 These articles appeared in Sport Magazine, American Legion Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, and Saga (as well as in True Magazine), and many were anthologized in a 1952 book, Champions Against Odds.45 No doubt Cobb, an avid reader, was familiar with these articles and was impressed enough to hire Stump to work on his autobiography.

Ty Cobb’s 1961 autobiography was the first book that Al Stump actually wrote. He went on to complete five more books, including a collaboration with Sam Snead in 1962 on another autobiography, The Education of a Golfer. After the 1961 Cobb autobiography, Stump also continued writing sports-related articles for men’s magazines, covering such notables as Albie Pearson, Brooks Robinson, Hank Aaron, Frank Howard, Vada Pinson, Curt Flood, Babe Pinelli, and Tommy Lasorda.46

Stump always focused on the adventurous and provocative side of the subjects he wrote about, seeing himself as an investigative reporter who sought out the “truth” where others failed. Many of his subsequent titles bore out this approach, such as his 1969 book The Champion Breed: The True, Behind-the-Scene Struggles of Sport’s Greatest Heroes.47 He never again achieved the success his 1961 Ty Cobb efforts gave him—until his 1994 Cobb biography and its subsequent movie adaptation. But he did score a significant scoop in 1972 that brought him notoriety outside the sports world as a key player in the Marilyn Monroe murder conspiracy and cover-up investigation. Stump arranged and attended the first of many meetings between his friend Bob Slatzer, who claimed to have been Marilyn’s husband for three days in 1952, and Milo Speriglio, a prominent Hollywood private detective. Slatzer claimed to have the inside scoop on Marilyn’s murder and the cover-up that followed and had come to Stump with the story after his life had been threatened by powerful people. Al Stump thus became the first link and the principal channel for information through which many interesting questions were ultimately answered, such as whether the father of Marilyn’s 12th aborted child was Jack Kennedy or his brother, Bobby; whether Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford had been with Marilyn at the time she was murdered; and what explosive political and personal secrets Marilyn had intended to reveal at the press conference that was scheduled for the morning after her death. After a 14-year investigation, Milo Speriglio published his book The Marilyn Conspiracy, without listing Stump as an author. But Speriglio gave prominent credit to Stump for bringing him the story and convincing him to take on the case.48

Stump’s second wife, Jolene Mosher, also a writer, said in describing Stump’s writing method that he “liked to sit back, have a few drinks, and egg someone on. . . . He’d encourage them to act up, to be really bad. He’d get good stories like that.” She also disclosed about Stump: “His only hobby was drinking.”49 No doubt this tactic, and possibly this hobby, was at play as Stump interacted with Cobb in their 1960 collaboration, producing fodder for the sensational and fictionalized parts of the True Magazine story.

Al Stump’s literary hero was Ernest Hemingway, a role model for many young postwar writers who imitated his writing style, even if they were unable to live his adventurous lifestyle.50 Hemingway died in 1961 at his own hand from a shotgun blast to the head—only two weeks before Ty Cobb died. This tragic but sensational event was widely reported around the world, and the resulting months-long flurry of articles was surely followed closely by an admiring Al Stump. Afterward, Hemingway’s wife told Idaho authorities that the shotgun had discharged accidentally while Hemingway was cleaning it.51 His estate later sought to prevent the publication of details of the gruesome death scene,52 and a family friend took the shotgun that Hemingway had used, disassembled it into a dozen different pieces, and buried the pieces in widely different locations to prevent memorabilia collectors from later profiting from the gruesome relic.53 There is no evidence on which to conclude that the widely publicized shotgun death of Hemingway, Stump’s idol, influenced him as he crafted the fictionalized shotgun account of the death of W. H. Cobb. But the similarities to the W. H. Cobb shotgun story created by Stump are striking, particularly the gruesome descriptions of the death scenes. These similarities, and the coincidence of the shotgun death of Hemingway at precisely the same time as Stump’s 1961 writing efforts, make for interesting speculation about a possible influence.

Despite the substantial volume of work that Stump produced in his otherwise mediocre 50-year career, he received no national publicity or recognition, and certainly no acclaim, for anything unrelated to Ty Cobb. His only real career success—and his only lasting legacy—was based exclusively on Ty Cobb. Having saved all his notes and papers from the 1960 collaboration to produce his magnum opus in the 1994 Cobb biography and movie, Stump never escaped from the shadow of Ty Cobb hovering over him as the defining subject in his life’s work—but, perhaps he never really tried.54 In the intervening years, he either saved or created a large amount of additional material relating to Ty Cobb to sustain a newly found and profitable fascination with baseball memorabilia.

Exhibit 3. The note to Al Stump from Ty Cobb that gives Stump some of Cobb’s personal items, date uncertain. This note was offered in Stump’s letter (December 16, 1980) to auctioneer Howard Smith as evidence that Ty told him “to help myself to a bunch of his things stored at Atherton.” The original of this note was auctioned by Butterfields in 2001, and copies often accompany the sale of purported Ty Cobb items as evidence that they are authentic. Close examination of the content of the note shows that it refers to items left by Ty Cobb at the Stump residence after Ty departed from a working session there. Stump offered no other evidence that any memorabilia was gifted to him by Ty Cobb.

AL STUMP’S COLLECTION OF TY COBB MEMORABILIA

At the time of Ty Cobb’s death, Stump came into possession of a very large number of Cobb’s personal effects. Stump claimed that Ty Cobb had given him many personal possessions that had been in his Atherton home when he died and ultimately offered a note from Ty Cobb as evidence of the gift (see exhibit 3). Almost two decades later, Stump began a concerted effort to sell a substantial part of his “collection,” and thus began an interesting but little-known story that illuminates another method that Al Stump chose— beyond gory shotgun stories and sports fantasy writing—to ride Ty Cobb’s coattails to personal fame and fortune.

On November 29, 1980, Stump wrote to Howard G. Smith, a memorabilia auctioneer in San Antonio, Texas, offering “museum-quality” Ty Cobb pieces itemized as follows:

“Cobb’s leather-bound hip-pocket whisky flask, his silver-plated shaving mug and brush, straight-edge razor from the thirties, silver pocket knife, German-made, Damascus barreled shotgun used by Cobb in bird-hunting, a snakeskin-wrapped cane he used in 1960 (real oddity), razor strop, tobacco humidor, wrist watch, pen-and-pencil set and set of decoy ducks. All of these items are prominently engraved or otherwise inscribed with Cobb’s name or initials. I also have numerous photos, autographed, of Cobb, with Babe Ruth, in action poses, at the wheel of his racing cars, posed formally at home, even his baby picture, etc.”

He told Smith that these items were only a portion of his personal collection of Ty Cobb memorabilia, which was “the largest privately owned collection in the U.S.” He stated that had offers for the items from three New York–area collectors but that he wanted to further explore the market for possible auction before deciding how best to dispose of this part of his collection (see exhibit 4).55

Exhibit 4. A letter from Al Stump to auctioneer Howard G. Smith offering the sale of a portion of his collection of Ty Cobb memorabilia, which he describes as the largest privately owned collection of Cobb memorabilia in the country. The handwritten notes on the letter (other than Al Stump’s signature) are questions and comments written by Smith as he reviewed the letter and subsequently discussed the sale in phone conversations with Stump.

In a follow-up letter on December 16, 1980, Stump sent Smith a list and photos of the 13 items he was offering, along with his asking price for the more expensive items. Most pertinent to this investigation is the engraved double-barreled shotgun, offered at $2,500 and shown in the set of photos that Stump provided to Smith (see exhibit 5). This is the shotgun that ultimately became part of the Barry Halper collection and was initially listed in (but withdrawn from) the 1999 Sotheby’s auction. Its description is precisely the same as that printed by Sotheby’s, even including “Tyrus R. Cobb” being engraved near the trigger.56

Exhibits 5. Photos of the Damascus-barreled double-barreled shotgun sent by Al Stump to Howard G. Smith. Stump noted in his letter that the shotgun has “Tyrus R. Cobb” engraved in the steel above the trigger. Stump would later fraudulently claim that this was the shotgun used by Amanda Cobb to shoot Ty’s father, William H. Cobb, in 1905. This is the shotgun that found its way into the Barry Halper collection and ultimately into the 1999 Sotheby’s auction catalog, only to be pulled because of its questionable authenticity. (The complete set of correspondence from Stump to Smith, including letters, envelopes, lists, and photos, was purchased at auction by the author in May 2009 and remains in his personal collection.)

Weeks later, on January 15, 1981, Stump again wrote Smith to provide a more detailed list, now including 18 items, some with descriptions enhanced in ways that belie their credibility. In the first list, Stump itemized a “Benrus watch with leather band (watch doesn’t work).” In the second list, this item had suddenly become even more valuable, as Stump implied that this was the watch that Cobb was wearing when he died: “Wristwatch—a Benrus of 1940–1950 period with his full name burned into the brown leather strap. Face of watch is worn. Watch is stopped at 1:20 P.M. Cobb died between 1:15 P.M. and 1:30 P.M., according to doctors. Fair shape.”57

The shotgun was described as: “Twin-barrel shotgun used by Cobb in bird hunting in the 1920s–30s: Damascus barrel makes it an antique. About 7 pounds with fancy scrollwork on the butt and ‘Tyrus R. Cobb’ engraved in the steel above the triggers. ‘I killed a few hundred ducks with it,’ he told me. Gun is Rusty.” No mention was made of this gun having been the one used by Amanda Cobb in the shooting of W. H. Cobb—that only became part of the story when the shotgun was sold into the Halper collection and ultimately described in the 1999 Sotheby’s catalog for the Halper auction.

Apparently, no agreement was reached between Stump and Smith as a result of this exchange of letters, because the items they discussed all found their way into other auctions and collections, many ultimately landing in Barry Halper’s. Even today, when an item from Stump’s collection appears at auction, there most often is also a photocopy of the note, handwritten by Cobb, which tells Stump: “You can have all the ties, shirts, robes, etc. I leave behind—also the old trophies used for book illustrations—and some signed odds and ends for young Johnny.” This note is the supposed permission that Stump had for having taken the very extensive number of personal items from Cobb’s Atherton residence. Stump’s December 16, 1980, letter offered a copy of this letter to Howard Smith, describing it as: “A copy of a letter Ty to me— in which he tells me to help myself to a bunch of his things stored at Atherton.” But the letter actually gives Stump only a few items that Cobb left at Stump’s Santa Barbara residence when he departed after a working session there on the 1961 autobiography. It is clear that the limited scope of what Ty Cobb actually gave to Al Stump was far exceeded by the essential cleanout from Cobb’s Atherton home of every conceivable item that could in any way be associated with Cobb—even his false teeth (see exhibit 6).

Exhibit 6: Ty Cobb Items offered or sold by Al Stump after 1980

• Leather-bound hip-pocket whiskey flask
• Silver-plate shaving mug and brush
• Straight-edge razor for the 1930s
• Silver pocket knife
• German-made, Damascus-barreled antique shotgun
• Snake-skin-wrapped cane
• Engraved wooden cane
• Razor strop
• Tobacco humidor
• Wrist watch
• Pen-and-pencil set
• Set of Decoy ducks
• Numerous Photos, all autographed, 16×20 & 8×10
     Ty with Babe Ruth
     Ty standing at the plate
     Ty at the wheel of his racing car
     Ty posed informally at home
     Ty’s baby picture
• 1910 Detroit Tigers uniform shirt game-worn by Ty Cobb
• 1910 Detroit Tigers cap game-worn by Ty Cobb
• Ty Cobb Signed baseball
• Circular poker-chip holder & 200 chips
• Deck of cards
• Monogrammed dressing gown
• Yellow bone-handled knife
• Three smoking pipes
• Smoking pipe holder
• Corncob pipe given to Ty by Gen. Douglas McArthur
• Rusty cowbell from Cobb’s Ranch
• 3 baseball bats
• Ty Cobb signed game-used bat – forged
• Fishing Hat
• Ty Cobb’s Dentures
• Cobb & Co. brass belt buckle – falsely attributed to Ty Cobb
• Christmas Card signed by Ty Cobb dated 1960
• 12 Smoking Pipes
• Brass ashtray
• Brass and Leather ashtray
• Cigarette case with matching ashtray
• Wooden tea canister, “Ty Cobb” written in pencil on bottom
• Tape measure in leather case
• Servant’s bell
• Stampette set with three stamps
• 2 cork lifters
• Small ceramic tiger
• Wooden key ring holder with mallard design
• Large carving knife set in wooden case
• Hunting knife in leather case
• Pocket knife
• Pen knife
• Comb in pewter case
• Wooden tackle box with lure
• 6 Ty Cobb signed baseballs – forged signatures
• 50 to 100 signed letters on Ty Cobb letterhead – forged
• Dozens of Ty Cobb signed baseball magazine pages – forged

A partial listing of the Ty Cobb memorabilia items from the Al Stump collection offered or sold at various times between 1980 and 2001. Comparison of this list to the six specific items gifted to Stump by Ty Cobb in the note of exhibit 3 raises the question of the legitimacy of Stump’s possession of these Ty Cobb collectibles.

WHAT THE MEMORABILIA EXPERTS KNOW

Item 13 of the December 16, 1980, list sent to Howard Smith by Al Stump is described as: “Letters to me from Cobb, typed for him on his personal letterhead stationary and signed ‘Ty,’ in which he discusses what he wanted to go into his autobiography and other matters: 6 x 7 inches.” These letters, estimated by experts in the autograph business to be as many as 50 to 100 in number, created much excitement in the collecting community when they surfaced, principally because of their extensive baseball content—a fact that adds considerable value to any famous player’s correspondence. On cursory inspection, they appear authentic, since they are typed on apparently genuine Ty Cobb letterhead and signed in the green ink that Ty Cobb was well known for using. Ultimately these letters were sold into the market and then were discredited as forgeries by numerous authenticators.

They were first offered to Mike Gutierrez, a prominent authenticator, who authenticated them as genuine and then sold them directly and at auction to trusting buyers. Although the signatures on these letters displayed a more shaky hand than authentic Cobb signatures, Gutierrez explained that to be a result of Cobb’s advancing age and declining health and strength—something modern authenticators have disproved through a thorough analysis of steady Cobb signatures dated as late as May 1961, only two months before his death. The fantastic baseball content contained in these forged letters has been quoted by unsuspecting historians, and the incorrect and falsified information has become part of accepted history.58 One example of these Ty Cobb letters forged by Al Stump is in exhibit 7.

Exhibit 7. One of the estimated 50 to 100 letters from Ty Cobb to Al Stump that were forged by Stump on apparently genuine letterhead taken from Cobb’s Atherton residence after Cobb’s death. These forgeries contained much baseball-related content, which made them more valuable to collectors. Some of the quesionable “facts” in these forged letters became part of baseball history when they were accepted by historians as truthful.

The forged Stump letters are very well known among memorabilia authenticators and collectors. Jim Stinson, a veteran authenticator and collector, wrote at length about the Stump forgeries in Sports Collectors Digest,59 and Ronald B. Keurajian, the premier expert on Ty Cobb autographs, has covered them in detail in the definitive article on authenticating Cobb autographs.60 Harvey Swanebeck, another long-time autograph collector who purchased one of the Stump-forged Cobb letters in the 1980s, had the unique experience of later finding for sale at a national convention a Ty Cobb letter with the exact same textual content as his own. Evidently Al Stump had created multiple “original” copies of some of the Cobb letters he forged, assuming that the duped purchasers would never meet and compare the content of their forged documents.61 Even autograph expert Mike Gutierrez, who originally authenticated the Stump-forged Ty Cobb letters, later agreed that the Stump letters were indeed forgeries.62

Stump’s forgeries went far beyond written material he created using genuine Ty Cobb letterhead that he had taken from Cobb’s Atherton residence. They also included many, many photos and pages from baseball-related publications on which were written tidbits of baseball history, wisdom, or advice (often personalized to Stump) along with a forged Ty Cobb signature in his trademark green ink.63 Exhibits 8 and 9 are several examples of these fake artifacts, which were again offered at auction in 2009 and then withdrawn because experts pointed them out as forgeries. As another example of the extent of Al Stump’s deception, in the mid-1980s Stump offered a lot of six Ty Cobb–signed baseballs to Ron Keurajian in a phone conversation. Keurajian declined the offer because he lacked the funds to complete the deal. A month later, Keurajian met the Michigan collector who purchased this lot, and after inspecting the six Cobb signatures, he concluded that all six were forgeries.64

Exhibit 8. A copy of one of many photographs of Ty Cobb onto which Al Stump forged comments that he attributed to Ty Cobb along with Ty Cobb’s signature. This photo was offered at auction in May 2009 but was withdrawn when experts notified the auction service that it was a forgery.

Exhibit 9. Four examples of the dozens of baseball-related pages from publications onto which Al Stump forged Ty Cobb’s autograph and comments attributed to Ty Cobb. These four were again offered at auction in May 2009 but withdrawn when experts notified the auction service that they were forgeries.

Al Stump’s efforts to create and sell off Ty Cobb artifacts was so blatant that the entire high-end memorabilia collectors’ industry even today dismisses out of hand the authenticity of anything that has the name of Al Stump in its provenance. Ron Keurajian, now one of the country’s leading Cobb autograph experts, recently confided, “I, personally, would not trust anything that originated from Stump.”65 Robert Lifson, the memorabilia expert who managed the 1999 sale of the Barry Halper collection, examined dozens of Ty Cobb artifacts and Cobb-signed documents sourced to Al Stump, many of them identical to those described by Stump in his 1981 correspondence with Howard Smith. Lifson said in a recent interview that all Stump items in the Halper collection became suspect after it was proven conclusively that a Ty Cobb game-used bat that Stump supplied to Halper was not authentic, based on the dating of the bat by detailed analysis. Of the large number of Ty Cobb documents from Stump that came to Sotheby’s, practically all were judged by Lifson to be fraudulent.

Lifson went on to say, after reading the content of these letters and examining the forged signatures, that “Stump must have thought that he was creating history, or something.” His faking of so many Ty Cobb documents “must have been a pathological issue with Stump, something deep-seated within him. It was just crazy how Stump went to such elaborate lengths to create the forged Cobb documents.”66

Josh Evans, a widely respected memorabilia expert and principal in the very successful Leland’s Auctions, has a much more serious indictment of Al Stump. Evans, a young collector and authenticator in the mid-1980s when Al Stump was actively trying to sell Cobb memorabilia, worked with Mike Guttierez on selling the Cobb items that Stump supplied. Many of the items were sold to Barry Halper, one of Evans’ best customers. After seeing multiple batches of purported Cobb items arrive from Stump via Guttierez, and becoming ever more suspicious with each batch, Evans notified Guttierez that, in his judgment, the items were all fakes—not just the now-infamous Stump letters on Cobb stationary, but many other personal items that had supposedly been owned by Ty Cobb.

In a recent interview, Evans stated: “The Cobb stuff that was coming to me through Gutierrez all looked like it had been made yesterday. It seemed that Stump was buying this old stuff from flea markets, and then adding engravings and other personalizations to give the appearance of authenticity.” Young Evans was so distressed by the fake Stump material that Gutierrez continued to sell that he first told Barry Halper of his suspicions and then contacted the FBI in an attempt to get an official investigation of Al Stump started.

Finally, he tracked down Al Stump and phoned him at home to tell him: “I know what you are doing, forging all this memorabilia. I’ve contacted the FBI. You had better stop!” Evans also related in a recent interview: “To this day, I’ve never seen any piece of Cobb memorabilia from Al Stump that could be definitely said to be authentic. And I have seen a lot of things over the years.” In closing the interview, Evans added: “It was not just Ty Cobb signatures that Al Stump forged. He did a Jim Thorpe signature that I identified as fake. Stump developed a ‘style’ in his illegal forgeries that I came to recognize, always accompanying them with fantastic content that he knew would increase the value to collectors.”67

AL STUMP’S FORGED TY COBB DIARIES

The most recent and perhaps most embarrassing episode in the Stump forged memorabilia saga first came to light, as did the fake Cobb shotgun, via the Barry Halper collection. Among the 180 Halper items purchased in 1998 by MLB and donated to the Hall of Fame Museum was a 1946 diary of Ty Cobb’s (see exhibit 10). This diary was an important addition to the Cooperstown collection, which was accompanied by other truly significant relics such as Shoeless Joe Jackson’s 1919 White Sox jersey and the contract that sent Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees.

Exhibit 10. Ty Cobb’s 1946 diary purchased by Major League Baseball from Barry Halper and donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1998. This diary was exhibited from 1999 through 2001 in the Barry Halper Gallery at the Hall of Fame. An FBI investigation in 2009 determined that the diary was a forgery. A recent comparison of the writings in this diary to the writings of Al Stump on the baseball-publication pages shown in exhibit 9 lead autograph expert Ronand B. Keurajian to conclude that Al Stump was the forger who created this diary.

The Cobb diary was a prized acquisition, covering the entire month of January 1946 and containing daily handwritten entries in Cobb’s famous green ink. The museum made a realistic looking copy of the diary to assure that the valuable original would not be damaged while displayed from 1999 through 2001 in the “Halper Memories of a Lifetime” exhibit in the Barry Halper Gallery. Visitors to this exhibit could view the original Cobb diary, wall-mounted in a clear protective case, and then peruse this realistic-looking copy, turning page by page with their own fingers, reading and relishing each daily entry of very personal notes and comments that Cobb had made to himself. The entries were tantalizing to museum visitors and to writers and historians as well, providing new insights into this complicated icon of the game. The diary, never before seen by the public, included musings Cobb made to himself like “drinking too much” and “I stayed sober” and many other secret tidbits that Cobb wrote as comments or criticisms about other players. These entries had obviously been written with no inkling that they would ever be seen by the any but Cobb’s own eyes. Or, so it appeared.

In December 2008, Ron Keurajian, the Ty Cobb autograph expert, examined the HOF Cobb diary and compared its entries to known genuine examples of Ty Cobb’s handwriting. He concluded that the diary entries were definitely not written by Ty Cobb. Keurajian notified the HOF Museum of his opinion, and officials there ultimately told him that the diary would be submitted to the FBI for further investigation.68

Concerns about the diary’s authenticity were closely guarded while the FBI investigation was underway in early 2009. The actual date that the FBI delivered their final report to the HOF was not released, nor was the FBI report itself. However, by July 5, 2009, Ernie Harwell, the veteran Detroit sportscaster, was onto the story and went public with it in a Detroit Free Press article titled: “Questions Remain about the Fake Cobb Diary.”69 Harwell quoted Ron Keurajian’s opinion: “The quality of the forgery is rudimentary, at best. It is far from being well-executed, as the hand evidences unsteady lines and the handwriting seems almost child-like. The entries appear contrived. For example, there is one about Joe DiMaggio which states ‘he can’t putt for big money’ and another entry states ‘also drinking too much.’ Anybody who has ever read Cobb’s writings knows that he would not write in such a fashion. Cobb was well-versed in the art of the written word and would never write crude comments such as these.” Harwell closed his article with the remaining questions he alluded to in the title: “Who was the forger? How did he con Halper into buying the diary? Did Halper have it authenticated? If so, by whom? Do any other copies of the fraudulent diary exist?”

Evidently, Ernie Harwell was not aware of a 1995 Sports Illustrated article by Franz Lidz titled “The Sultan of Swap,” which provided an in-depth look at Barry Halper and his extensive memorabilia collection.70 Along with details about many of Halper’s relics, this article describes in text and photographs many of the items of “Cobbabilia” that Halper had collected. Lidz had access to the entire Halper collection, and had grouped many Cobb items to be photographed for his article, including a game-worn Detroit jersey, Cobb’s dentures and the infamous Cobb shotgun. Lidz wrote: “Halper has the Georgia Peach’s straightedge razor, shaving cup, shaving strop, bathrobe, diaries, dentures, fishing hat, corncob pipe, pocket flask and even the shotgun Cobb’s mother used to blow away his father. Halper wheedled all this out of Al Stump” (emphasis added).

The first and second questions posed by Ernie Harwell seem to have been answered by Lidz in 1995. Al Stump was the forger of the HOF diary, just as he was for the large number of letters on Ty Cobb letterhead and the many autographed and annotated baseball publication pages and photographs so well known among collectors and authenticators. And, it was Halper who “wheedled,” i.e. persuaded and cajoled, Stump out of the forgery. To confirm beyond any doubt that Al Stump was the forger of the 1946 HOF diary, autograph expert Ron Keurajian recently made a detailed comparison of its entries to the Stump annotations on the baseball publication pages shown in Exhibit 9 and concluded that they were “all the same hand.”71

As to the last question Harwell poses: Yes, there are other forged Cobb diaries, as is clearly implied in Lidz’s use of the plural “diaries” in his 1995 article. The Elliott Museum in Stuart Florida has in their collection a Ty Cobb diary covering a full month of 1942. When asked to compare their diary with the HOF diary, Janel Hendrix, the curator there, replied that the HOF diary “. . . looks to be the same as ours. Although ours is a 1942 diary, it is the same type of diary and the writing samples appear to be very similar.” Hendrix added that she had been contacted by the HOF about the disproved authenticity of the diary in the HOF collection and, on that basis, had removed 1942 diary from the Elliott Museum display.72

With this episode now in the public light, it is evident that the Ty Cobb fantasies and forgeries created by Al Stump have infected the very heart of baseball myth and history—the hallowed Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. The legitimacy of the Stump-forged items had seemed reasonable enough when they first began to appear in the 1980s, based on Stump’s well-known collaboration with Cobb on the 1961 autobiography. Stump had a believable reason to possess writings by Ty Cobb and other pieces of Cobb memorabilia. The apparent legitimacy of many of these items was further enhanced by the inclusion of the Stump fakeries in the famous and highly publicized Barry Halper collection and by their prominent display in the prestigious Hall of Fame Museum. Nevertheless, we now know that Al Stump forged the Ty Cobb diaries, letters, and other autographed items that made up his memorabilia “collection.”

WHAT OTHER WRITERS KNOW

Furman Bisher, sports editor and writer for the Atlanta Constitution for 59 years, knew Ty Cobb well. He wrote several articles on Cobb and spent three full days with him in 1958 when he was writing the Post article about Ty moving back to Georgia and building his final retirement home. Furman knew Al Stump from his writings and as a result has a very low opinion of him. In my recent interview with Furman, he stated strongly that “the True Magazine article was a disgrace” and that “Al Stump took advantage of a dying man.” When asked about the provocative stories that Stump wrote about Cobb, he went further: I would not believe a thing he said.” Furman Bisher felt so strongly about the injustice done to Ty Cobb by Al Stump that he took more than an hour away from the time he had devoted to writing the last column of his 59-year career with the Constitution to be interviewed on Cobb and Stump.

Historian Charles Alexander, in his more recent writings, took direct aim at Stump’s credibility, asserting that Stump had not actually spent the amount of time with Cobb that he had claimed, describing the Stump interaction with Cobb instead as a “14-month intermittent collaboration.”73 Alexander also charged that much of Stump’s writings on Cobb had borrowed heavily, and without attribution, from the 1975 John McCallum biography. Alexander later said that the 1961 True Magazine article “read like a gothic horror story.” Alexander also wrote recently that he had been the first author to “pin down the particular circumstances of William Herschel Cobb’s death from gunshots fired by his wife, Amanda Chitwood Cobb, and her trial and acquittal the following spring.”74 Charles Alexander did indeed “pin down” details on the shooting of W. H. Cobb, but unfortunately his source of information was both second hand and faulty. He was incorrect in the retelling of the now disproved shotgun story and, as a result, was incorrect in writing his own somewhat gory description of the crime scene.

OTHER STUMP STORIES IN THE TY COBB MYTH

This investigation dispels perhaps the most distasteful element of the Ty Cobb myth with definitive proof. A pistol, not a shotgun, was used in the shooting of W. H. Cobb, and therefore there was no crime scene in which W. H. Cobb’s head was practically blown off at the neck, nor did his abdomen pour forth its contents onto the porch roof of the Cobb home in Royston. Two pistol shots were all that were fired, and even at close range, these could not produce the grotesque scene that myth would have us believe.

Another of the more outrageous stories written by Stump was the “Cobb killed a man” story, which also first appeared in Stump’s 1961 True Magazine article and then was enhanced in his 1994 Cobb biography. In Detroit, on August 12, 1912, Ty Cobb and his wife were attacked by three robbers, whom Cobb managed to fight off, sustaining only a knife wound to his back. Ty then traveled by train to Syracuse and played in a game the following day. This attack was reported widely in the press in the days following the incident. Al Stump, who misdates the attack to June 3, 1912, has Ty confessing to having killed one of his three attackers. After Ty’s pistol wouldn’t fire, he supposedly told Stump that he had killed one attacker by using the gunsight of his pistol to “rip and slash and tear him . . . until he had no face left.” To the 1994 Cobb biography Stump adds this substantiation of the story: “A few days later a press report told of an unidentified body found off Trumbull in an alley.” That a death occurred in this incident was conclusively disproved in the 1996 National Pastime article “Ty Cobb Did Not Commit Murder.”75 SABR member Doug Roberts, a criminal lawyer, former prosecutor, and forensics specialist, performed an exhaustive study of the Detroit autopsy records for the time period around the 1912 attack and found not a single piece of evidence that a death such as Stump described had actually occurred. Further, Roberts found no Detroit newspaper article describing such a death or the discovery of an unidentified body, as Stump had asserted. Doug Roberts concluded that no murder occurred at the hands of Ty Cobb.

Practically all of Stump’s sensationalized story of the last ten months of Ty Cobb’s life is outrageously false. Stump would have us believe that these months were the alcohol-and-drug-crazed nightmare of a raging lunatic with whom Stump lived in a state of constant fear. Actually, Stump spent only a few days on and off with Ty Cobb, collectively no more than a few weeks during the 11 months between June 1960 and May 1961—three months before Cobb’s death.76 Cobb’s constant companion for the last two months of his life told a much different story in a 1982 Sports Illustrated interview.77 Dr. Rex Teeslink of Augusta, Georgia, then a medical student on summer break, was hired in May 1961 by Cobb as his full-time nurse. Teeslink describes a much different Ty Cobb from the demon Stump created. Concerned that he was becoming addicted to the strong painkillers he was taking for terminal cancer and end-stage diabetes, Ty Cobb proposed and withstood a 36-hour test during which he took no medication at all for pain—hardly the behavior of the addict of Stump’s fantasy. When Teeslink drove Ty to the Cobb family mausoleum in Royston, he was somber—but Ty was whimsical and upbeat. Cobb suggested that they should have a signal so Cobb would recognize Rex when he visited the tomb after his death, so they “could sit down and talk the way we do now.”78 Throughout this experience, Teeslink saw none of the rage and unbalance that Stump described. He came to know and genuinely respect Ty Cobb. “He was a master of psychology,” Teeslink said. “Grantland Rice wrote about it. No one ever had done the things he did, thought the way he did. He was amazing. You always had the feeling he knew what you were going to say before you said it. He’d always be looking around the room, sizing up people. If he was playing cards, he’d know what all six people were holding. He always was thinking, but he never wanted people to know what was going on in his mind. He always wanted the edge.” Reflecting on Al Stump’s True Magazine portrayal of Cobb, Teeslink added: “I’m talking now because I want to set the record straight. . . . The things that have been written, the way he has been portrayed. . . . None of them are true.”79

Other medical professionals who cared for Cobb in his last days also failed to observe the antics that Stump fictitiously portrayed in True Magazine. Jean Bergdale Eilers was a young nurse when she cared for Ty Cobb for a night in May 1961, filling in for his regular private-duty nurse, who was ill. Describing her experience with Cobb, which occurred barely two months before his death, she recently wrote: “Mr. Cobb was up most of the night. He sat in a chair and dictated letters to me. He required a lot of pain medicine and I remember giving him frequent back rubs. . . . He was pleasant and never caused me any problems. I took a baseball with me that night, and he gladly signed it for my 13-year-old brother. . . . When Mr. Cobb was re-admitted in June for his final days . . . I left another ball with him and after about three days I was told he had signed it. That was only about 3 weeks before he died.”80

So what other outrageous Stump stories about Cobb are either completely false or overblown and exaggerated? That Cobb’s close friendship with Ted Williams ended completely after an argument over which players should be on the all-time All-Star team—refuted by Williams himself, who said Stump invented the story and bluntly generalized about Stump: “He’s full of it.”81 That Cobb refused to sign autographs for fans and was unfriendly to kids— refuted by Jean Eilers affidavit described above and further disproved by the hundreds of genuine Cobb-signed baseballs, postcards, photos, and other items, many personalized to children, which survive and now sell for thousands of dollars each in the memorabilia market. That he carried a loaded Luger with him to his last hospital stay in the same brown bag that contained a stack of negotiable securities—refuted by Jimmy Lanier, Cobb’s personal batboy in 1925 and 1926, who with his son, Jim, visited Cobb in his last days at Emory Hospital, listened as Cobb showed and described the Coca-Cola stock and other securities in the brown bag, and saw no evidence of a gun, either in the bag or elsewhere in the room.82 That Ty Cobb’s funeral was shunned by all but a few baseball players and dignitaries—refuted by The Sporting News, which reported shortly after Ty’s death that the family had notified Cobb’s friends and baseball dignitaries that the funeral service, held only 48 hours after Cobb passed, was going to be private and asked them not to attend.83 A more appropriate question would surely be: What Stump stories about Ty Cobb are not either outright fantasy or gross exaggerations based loosely on questionable fact?

Ron Shelton, who directed the movie Cobb based on Al Stump’s writings, called Stump a “supreme storyteller” in the eulogy he delivered at the memorial service after Stump’s death.84 It is a longstanding Southern tradition to call someone a “storyteller” as a polite way of calling him a liar. Although Shelton surely missed this regional nuance, it nevertheless seems an appropriate moniker for Al Stump. There is no doubt that Al Stump is a proven liar, proven forger, likely thief, and certainly a provocateur who created fabricated and sensationalized stories of the True Magazine ilk. Can there be any doubt that scholars and historians should adopt the same approach to Al Stump–written material that the memorabilia experts have adopted toward Stump’s forged memorabilia: dismissing out of hand as untrue any Ty Cobb story that is sourced to Al Stump?

CONCLUSION

Ty Cobb created more than the normal amount of controversy during his lifetime, and he lived to suffer the negative effects of his actions on his reputation. Until his death in 1961, Ty was genuinely concerned with his baseball legacy, often expressing concern about being remembered for spikings, fighting, and aggressive play. Even more controversy, beyond that related to Cobb’s playing style, has arisen since his death, practically all of it deriving from the sensationalized and fictional writings of Al Stump. These are the writings that are responsible for many, if not most, of the more outrageous—and mostly untrue—elements of the Cobb myth.

I urge each SABR member, and indeed any baseball fan or historian who seeks to know and support the unexaggerated truth, to reexamine his own beliefs about Ty Cobb in light of the results of this investigation. For the others whose inquiring minds insist on believing untruths and exaggerations or who thrive on the excitement and provocation of the True Magazine style of history, there will likely never be a proof or revelation that will dispel their beliefs. Sadly, many widely read contemporary sports bloggers, writers, and commentators fall into this latter category, much to the continuing detriment of Ty Cobb’s memory.

WILLIAM R. “RON” COBB is editor of “My Twenty Years in Baseball” (Dover, 2009) by Ty Cobb and initiated reprints of several historically significant baseball books. He serves on the board of advisors of the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston, Georgia.

Notes

1 John Thorn, blog post dated December 29, 2005. http://thornpricks.blogspot.com.

2 Personal communication from Wesley Fricks, historian for the Ty Cobb Museum, e-mail dated July 16, 2006.

3 Personal communication, Candy Ross, curator of the Ty Cobb Museum, October 2006.

4 The Barry Halper Collection of Baseball Memorabilia, Sale 7354, 3 vols. (New York: Sotheby’s, 1999).

5 Personal communication, Tim Wiles, director of research, National Baseball Hall of Fame, e-mail dated August 9, 2006.

6 Personal communication, Robert Lifson, e-mail dated November 26, 2006.

7 The Barry Halper Collection of Baseball Memorabilia, Sale 7354, vol. 1: The Early Years, 429.

8 Lifson e-mail.

9 “Cobb Was Told to Keep Watch Over His Home,” Atlanta Constitution, August 11, 1905: 1.

10 Personal communication, Joanne Smaley, Georgia Archives researcher, e-mail dated June 30, 2009.

11Macon (Georgia) Weekly Telegraph, September 25, 1905: 1.

12 Smaley e-mail.

13 Messages posted to the SABR Deadball Committee Yahoo Group site, June 22-23, 2004. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/deadball.

14 Franklin County, Georgia, Superior Court minutes, Book 5, 1901–1905, p. 478, GAR.RG-159-1-58.

15 Personal communication, Wesley Fricks, historian for the Ty Cobb Museum, e-mail dated July 17, 2009.

16 Sverre Braathen, Ty Cobb: The Idol of Baseball Fandom (New York: Avondale Press, 1928).

17 Ty Cobb, My Twenty Years in Baseball (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2009).

18 H. G. Salsinger, “Which Was Greatest: Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth?” The Sporting News Baseball Register (1951).

19 Gene Schoor, The Story of Ty Cobb (New York: Julian Messner, 1966).

20 John McCallum, The Tiger Wore Spikes: An Informal Biography of Ty Cobb (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1956).

21 Ty Cobb, My Life in Baseball: The True Record (New York: Doubleday, 1961).

22 Al Stump, “Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight to Live,” True—The Man’s Magazine, December 1961: 38.

23 John McCallum, Ty Cobb (New York: Henry Holt, 1975).

24 Robert Rubin, Ty Cobb: The Greatest (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1978).

25 Charles Alexander, Ty Cobb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

26 Don Rhodes, Ty Cobb: Safe at Home (Guilford, Connecticut, Lyons Press, 2008), 24.

27 Richard Bak, Ty Cobb: His Tumultuous Life and Times (Dallas: Taylor, 1994).

28 Richard Bak, Peach: Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ann Arbor Media, 2005).

29 Norman Macht, Ty Cobb (New York: Chelsea House, 1993).

30 Sydelle Kramer, Ty Cobb: Bad Boy of Baseball (New York: Random House, 1995).

31 Patrick Creevy, Tyrus (New York: Forge, 2002). A fictionalized biography of Ty Cobb.

32 Dan Holmes, Ty Cobb (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004).

33 Al Stump, Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 1994).

34 Tom Stanton, Ty and the Babe (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).

35 Rhodes, Ty Cobb: Safe at Home.

36 Stump, “Ty Cobb’s Wild, 10-Month Fight to Live.”

37 Al Stump, “The Last Days of Ty Cobb,” Baseball Magazine 95, no. 1 (January 1965): 14–18.

38 Charles Einstein, ed., The Third Fireside Book of Baseball (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968).

39 Bak, Peach, 210.

40 Personal communication, Candy Ross, curator of the Ty Cobb Museum, e-mail dated October 21, 2009.

41 Personal communication, Furman Bisher, sports editor for the Atlanta Constitution, interview on October 9, 2009.

42 Leigh Montville, “The Last Remains of a Legend,” Sports Illustrated 77, no. 17 (October 1992): 60.

43 Bak, Peach, 194.

44 The Baseball Index, Society for American Baseball Research. www.baseballindex.org.

45 Al Stump, Champions Against Odds (Philadelphia: Macrea Smith, 1952).

46 The Baseball Index.

47 Al Stump, The Champion Breed: The True, Behind-the-Scene Struggles of Sport’s Greatest Heroes (New York: Bantam Books, 1969).

48 Milo Speriglio, The Marilyn Conspiracy (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), 26–31.

49 Bak, Peach, 195.

50 Ibid.

51 New York Times, July 3, 1961: 1.

52 Ron Martinetti, Hemingway: A Look Back. www.americanlegends.com/authors/index.html.

53 Private communication, e-mail from Ron Stinson, August 5, 2008.

54 Private communication, interview with Lewis Martin, Al Stump’s 1994 researcher in Michigan, November 12, 2009.

55 Personal communication, Al Stump to Howard G. Smith, letter dated November 29, 1980. This letter and several follow-up letters, along with memorabilia item lists and photographs, are in the personal collection of the author.

56 Personal communication, Al Stump to Howard G. Smith, letter dated December 16, 1980. Original in the author’s personal collection.

57 Personal communication, Al Stump to Howard G. Smith, letter dated January 15, 1981. Original in the author’s private collection.

58 Jim Stinson, “Ty, Pariah or Peach,” Sports Collectors Digest, May 5, 2006: 36–42.

59 Ibid.

60 Ronald B. Keurajian, “Ty Cobb Autographs.” www.autograph-club.org/autograph-article/ty-cobb-autographs.html.

61 Personal communication, Harvey Swanebeck, SABR member and collector, interview on November 4, 2009.

62 Ibid.

63 Personal communication, Karl Stone, e-mail dated June 5, 2009.

64 Personal communication, Ron Kerurajian, interview on November 20, 2009.

65 Personal communication, Ron Kerurajian, e-mail dated October 18, 2009.

66 Personal communication, Robert Lifson, interview on October 9, 2009.

67 Personal communication, Josh Evans, interview on November 11, 2009.

68 Ernie Harwell, “Questions Remain about the Fake Cobb Diary,” Detroit Free Press, July 5, 2009, www.freep.com.

69 Ibid.

70 Franz Lidz, “The Sultan of Swap,” Sports Illustrated, May 22, 1995: 66-77.

71 Personal communication, Ron Keurajian, e-mail dated May 20, 2010.

72 Personal communication, Janel Hendrix, curator of The Elliot Museum, e-mail dated April 10, 2010.

73 Charles C. Alexander, “Introduction,” in My Life in Baseball: The True Record (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), xi.

74 Charles Alexander, Ty Cobb (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2006), 263.

75 Doug Roberts, “Ty Cobb Did Not Commit Murder,” The National Pastime 16 (1996): 25–28.

76 Bak, Peach, 198.

77 Montville, “The Last Remains of a Legend,” Sports Illustrated, 1982.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid.

80 Jean Bergdale Eilers, affidavit signed in 2008, held in the private collection of Ronald B. Keurajian.

81 Bak, Peach, 198.

82 Personal communication, Jim Lanier Jr., interview on October 29, 2009.

83 Bak, Peach, 203.

84 Geoff Boucher, “This Raconteur Was Simply the Best of the Best,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1996. http://articles.latimes.com/1996-01-26/news/ls-28983_1_al-stump.

Most of the lower-classification clubs were locally owned and operated. Many had working agreements with major-league organizations that provided the players and manager. But some were independent, scrounging for players as well as money. In 1951 I was the 21-year-old business manager of one such independent team, the Valley Rebels of the Class D Georgia–Alabama League. This is the story of how I got there and what I did there.

Legendary announcer Ernie Harwell got his start in the radio booth of Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park.

I arrived in Atlanta in the spring of 1948 at an age when the idea of conquering the world still seemed feasible. I knew only one person in the city, though I’d never met him. While a prewar student at Georgia Tech, my brother became friendly with the young sports director at radio station WSB (“Welcome South Brother”)—Ernie Harwell, who did a lot of interviews of present and past sports figures on his daily 15-minute show. After four years in the Marines, Harwell came home in 1946. Finding that WSB had cut back its sports coverage, he decided to go freelance and pursue his dream of becoming a play-by-play broadcaster. While stationed in Atlanta in 1943, he broadcast a few games for the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association (at that time, Class A-1) before the Corps put the kibosh on that activity. The club president, Earl Mann, welcomed him back in 1946, and he had been the voice of the Crackers ever since.

Ernie helped me get a job as a copywriter at the station that carried the games, WBGE (“Benton’s General Elevator”) and employed me as a gofer and statistician in the broadcast booth. There were no media staffs, no handouts with all the stats. We relied on newspapers and our own record-keeping. Before the game I went to the managers and picked up the lineups. I updated the batting averages and other basic, rudimentary stats of the time. After each Cracker time at bat during the game, I recalculated (by looking in a little book of batting-average calculations) the player’s numbers. The radio booth was separate from the press box. If there was a question for the official scorer or something about the rules or the past or a record, I went and got the answer. I brought Ernie the scores of other games in progress.

Broadcasters didn’t travel with the team. Road games were recreated sitting at a table in a small windowless studio in the basement of the Georgian Terrace Hotel. A Western Union operator sat across from us, an empty Prince Albert tobacco tin stuck between the key and the side of the wooden container to amplify the clickety taps. The operator, whom we knew only as “Buck,” typed the bare-bones result of each pitch and handed the slip of paper to Harwell, who had to bring it to life. Working a few batters behind the action, we got so we could recognize the sound of the brief clicks signifying a home run or double play to come. In the southern tradition, Harwell was a storyteller. He was long on stories and anecdotes, lean on stats-rattling. Stories have characters as well as action, but there were no media guides. During spring training and the first visits of the other teams to Atlanta, Ernie would go to the team hotel and talk to the players and coaches to learn their personal information: hometown, schools, family, hobbies, height and weight, off-season jobs— stuff he would refer to during the game that helped the listener know the players as individuals. Sometimes, when a new player joined a team between visits to Atlanta, I would gather that information for him.

An index card was made up for each player with his past records on one side and this personal info on the other. Ernie had designed a thin wooden case that opened flat. On each side was a place for the roster, lineups, scorecard, and defensive alignment for each team. Along each side were overlapping plastic sleeves for the index cards.

The delivery style that took him to the Hall of Fame was there from the beginning. I listen to an audition disc he cut in 1946 and a tape of an Orioles-Tigers game nearly fifty years later. He sounds the same. I knew Ernie for sixty-one years. He never changed. He wore like a pair of old slippers. He was completely unpretentious, easygoing, hospitable, courteous to everyone he met no matter who they were or their station in life. Even then, when I was a teenager, and throughout the next half-century, if he was with a group of broadcasters, writers, managers—whoever—and I appeared on the scene, he never failed to introduce me. In the 1980s and ’90s, when I was working in the Orioles’ press box and the Tigers were in town, I would bring friends into the tiny visitors’ broadcast booth to listen to him on the air; he treated them as if they were prospective sponsors. He never ate or drank anything while he was on the air. (I don’t think his weight varied a pound from the first time I saw him to the last.) Certainly his beret size never grew.

He was just as unflappable at home as he was on the air. He would sit in a wingback chair while his two little boys, Bill and Gray, would swing through the air from a trapeze bar secured high in a doorway behind him, and climb on or over him from the front or back, and he would carry on a conversation as though they didn’t exist. He was comfortable with a mike in his hands but not a hammer or screwdriver.

The April 1949 exhibition games featuring Jackie Robinson drew huge crowds.

Let me say here that no two finer people ever trod the earth than Ernie Harwell and his wife, Lulu. I had no place to stay when I first arrived in Atlanta in 1948. The Harwells kindly took me into their home until I found a rooming house near the ballpark. My stay with them was the most sleep-depriving experience of my life. It wasn’t their two little boys or a noisy neighborhood that kept me awake. My bed was in Ernie’s office, a room lined with bookshelves filled with baseball and other sports books and file cabinets stuffed with fascinating clippings on players past and present. What future SABR member could waste time sleeping in such surroundings?

It was the start of a friendship that continued all our lives. Later, when he was retired and writing a column for a Detroit newspaper, he would sometimes call me with a question about the old Crackers or Connie Mack or something he thought I might have researched. More often I would call him with questions about old-timers he may have met or interviewed. He always made me feel that he was glad I called.

In late July 1948, Brooklyn announcer Red Barber was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer. Branch Rickey had had his eye on Harwell and called for him to come and fill in for Barber. The ad agency for the Crackers’ sponsor, Old Gold cigarettes (Ernie never smoked), was okay with it, because they sponsored the Dodgers’ games, too. The Crackers’ president, Earl Mann, wouldn’t stand in his way, but Mann wanted a player in exchange, a catcher at Montreal named Cliff Dapper. Mann wanted him to manage the Crackers in 1949; Rickey agreed. Dapper managed the Crackers for one year; and never again managed above Class B. Ernie Harwell was still broadcasting in the major leagues almost sixty years later.

But before Ernie left for Brooklyn, I had a job to do. He needed cards full of personal information on the 200 players in the National League—pronto. Back I went into his office for a few days and sleepless nights to turn them out. I requested as compensation a few books from his library. I still have them.

For the next two years, I worked for Harwell’s successor, Jim Woods, a native of Kansas City, who later broadcast in New York, Pittsburgh, Oakland, and Boston. Woods, who wasn’t known as “Possum” then, was a cat of a different cut from Ernie. He was more of a party person. He and Earl Mann became good buddies. He introduced me to bourbon and Coke, a drink I called “A Babe in the Woods.” Part of my job was to get the Coke, pour a little out of the bottle, pour in the bourbon (which he handed me), and shake it up. In the booth. On the air. It never affected his work. He was an outstanding play-by-play man—nothing folksy—with a deep resonant voice. There were no cards with player information. He had a phenomenal memory. Among other things, he could name every Kentucky Derby winner. Jim’s wife Ramona, a sweet lady, was a buyer at Rich’s department store. Later when I visited Jim when he was with the Yankees, he had a huge English bulldog named Bogey. I never saw Bogey move a muscle.

Another announcer, Les Hendrickson, did pre-game interviews. Les was a big man well over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds. On the field they were a colorful pair, Woods in a flamingo pink suit and Hendrickson in a creamed spinach outfit.

On Saturday afternoons we did a major-league game of the week from the subterranean studio at the radio station.

The Atlanta Crackers were an independent team backed by Coca-Cola; all the other clubs in the league were affiliated with big-league clubs. The president and general manager was Earl Mann, and the Crackers operated the old-fashioned way. They had their own full-time scout, Joe Pastor, and their own working agreements with lower clubs. They signed players, developed them, and sold them to the major leagues. The team was a mix of men on their way down (like Jim Bagby Jr.), young men on their way up (like Art Fowler, Davey Williams, and Gene Verble), and career AA minor leaguers like outfielder Ralph “Country” Brown, a fast left-handed batter who taught me the beauty of the drag bunt. Earl Mann hired his own managers, and Kiki Cuyler had been his manager since 1944.

The entire operation consisted of Mann and two other men in the office—Jasper Donaldson and John Stanton—plus a concessions manager named Raul Ovares and groundskeeper Howard Hubbard. That’s all.

Ponce de Leon Park was located in a light commercial pocket on Ponce de Leon Avenue surrounded by residential neighborhoods. The field was below street level. Railroad tracks ran behind the right-field embankment. A lone magnolia tree bloomed on the steep slope in right center field more than 400 feet from home plate, undisturbed by fly balls since Babe Ruth’s time until Eddie Mathews arrived in 1950.

It was there that I had my one brief meeting with Connie Mack on the afternoon of April 13, 1948. As I described in the preface to my Connie Mack biography, Atlanta was a regular stop for major-league clubs barnstorming north from spring training. The Athletics were in town for two games.

Connie Mack was sitting on a park bench in left field while his team took batting practice. I decided I’d like to meet him. He was 85. I was 18. I walked out and introduced myself and shook hands—I remember bony but not gnarled fingers—and sat down. I asked him something about some team that was in the news—it might have been a clubhouse fight or something of that nature. He answered politely, patiently, assuring me that whatever it was wouldn’t affect the team’s performance on the field. I asked him about this and that—an 18-year-old’s questions, devoid of any great insight or import. After a few minutes I thanked him for the opportunity to talk with him and took my leave. I had no idea that I would be writing his biography sixty years later.

I was there when Jackie Robinson made his first Atlanta appearance with the Dodgers April 8, 9, 10, 1949. The Dodgers had broken attendance records in Texas and Oklahoma the spring before, avoiding their usual southeastern stops. Before the Friday night game, the KKK Grand Dragon announced that 10,000 people had signed a petition to boycott Crackers’ games, threatening large financial losses to the club, if any black players appeared on the field with whites.

A typical Class D ballpark of the 1950s, home of the Valley Rebels of the Georgia–Alabama League.

Earl Mann ignored the threats. Anticipating a capacity crowd, he had the outfield roped off from left to where the right-field wall began. The ropes were needed; the Friday night opener attracted 15,119 fans, one-third of them blacks, overflowing the stands. Hundreds sat on the embankment or atop the three tiers of billboards between the fence and the railroad tracks. The Dodgers won, 6–3, and Robinson and Roy Campanella were cheered loudly for every step they took. Almost 9,000 turned out for the Saturday afternoon game, won by Atlanta, 9–1. There was no hint of what was to come on Sunday.

The estimated capacity of Ponce de Leon Park was between 12,500 and 15,500. In those days, blacks were restricted to the outfield bleachers. Imagine the scene, then, when 13,885 blacks bought tickets, just over half of the total paid attendance of 25,221, which far surpassed the previous record of 21,812 at the 1948 opener.1 Standing room in the outfield and in the grandstand was packed solid. The embankment was covered with more people than the total attendance would be at most games.

For many of the fans, the highlight of the game, won by the Crackers, 8–4, was Robinson’s steal of home on the front end of a double steal in the second inning. There were no fights, riots, or disturbances of any kind at any of the games.

In 1950, Earl Mann gave me a job in the office so I could learn the business. On the side I also worked for the Howe News Bureau as the stats-compiler for three Class D leagues. The official scorers sent me their score sheets—sometimes coffee- or mustard-stained, written over, reworked beyond legibility. A 16-inning, 12–11 game with eight pitchers was a nightmare; the rare 1–0 game was a joy. I updated each player’s and team’s stats as I received them, and once a week cut a stencil (you’re old if you remember stencils) for each league, ran them off on the ink drum, and mailed them out to subscribers. I also brought the stats for the Southern Association’s top hitters and pitchers up to date each day and turned them in to the two Atlanta newspapers.

That was the year the Crackers signed a working agreement with the Boston Braves that brought them then 18-year-old Eddie Mathews, making the jump from Class D, where he’d hit .363. The Braves also supplied Bob Thorpe, Don Liddle, and Ebba St. Claire. Among the veterans were Ellis Clary, Hugh Casey in the last year of his life, and the perennial Atlanta favorite, Country Brown. The manager was Dixie Walker; the coach was Whitlow Wyatt.

The jury box was a section behind third base at Jennings Field reserved for the most vocal fans. When George Trautman, president of the Minor Leagues, visited in August 1951, he insisted on sitting there. Trautman, third from the left in the front row, inscribed this photo: “All parks should have a jury box. I enjoyed it.”

Mathews, with 32 home runs and 106 RBIs, led the Crackers to the pennant. Earl Mann allowed me to go with the team to Nashville for the playoff series. After the last game Whitlow Wyatt, who had driven there, invited me to go back to Atlanta with him. The Georgia native was the epitome of a courtly southern gentleman, but I had had it in for him ever since he dusted off my hero Joe DiMaggio, touching off a brawl in the fifth game of the 1941 World Series. When I confessed my grudge, he laughed it off. By the end of the ride, I had forgiven him.

Toward the end of the season, I heard a team in the Georgia–Alabama League was looking for a business manager for 1951. The league had teams in Rome, Griffin, and LaGrange in Georgia; Opelika and Alexander City in Alabama; and the Valley Rebels, who straddled the border and the Chattahoochee River. The Valley consisted of five West Point-Pepperell textile towns: West Point, Georgia, and Lanett, Langdale, Fairfax, and Shawmut in Alabama. The population was about 15,000 to 20,000.

Jennings Field was in Lanett. Named for 77- year-old Robert Jennings, known as the Dean of Valley Sportsmen, it resembled the ballpark in “Bull Durham”— wooden grandstand, small bleachers from home to first and third, a capacity of about 3,500.

The mills sponsored the team. I was interviewed and hired by the club president, Robert Rearden, manager of the Langdale Mill. Our public-address announcer was his son-in-law, a fact I did not know when I became dissatisfied with his performance and fired him. I was quickly “advised” to reverse that decision—advice I heeded.

For the previous two seasons the Rebels had had a working agreement with the Red Sox, but no longer. LaGrange was the only team with a major-league affiliation—the Yankees. We were on our own to round up players as best we could. In the end, 25 players came and went. Only one of them would ever set foot on a triple-A field, leaving no footprints. The manager, a veteran minor-league catcher named Perley “Gabby” Grant, signed up some of his friends, including 30-something semi-pros who were technically rookies in OB. Our first baseman, Mal Morgan, worked in one of the mills while playing every summer for the Rebels. Several of them put in five to eight years playing Class D ball, a breed that has been made extinct by baseball evolution.

And some were kids, like 18-year-old Gene Black, a big right-hander who won 10 games and pitched a no-hitter against LaGrange one night, the pinnacle of his brief career.

The “front office” was a one-man operation— me. Everything the staff of a minor-league club does today, I did. Everything: player transaction paperwork, promotions, selling ads for the outfield fence and scorecards, making speeches, hiring the ticket seller, stocking concession stands, counting the sticky dimes from the sno-cone stand after the game. My wife sold the scorecards and was my best PR asset.

An old man, Isham Corley, was the groundskeeper. He had been there for thirty years, through two previous incarnations of the league. I don’t remember if he was a county or a mill employee; perhaps I never knew.

For the past few years the Rebels had averaged under a thousand a game in attendance. I tried every corny promotion I could put together. On the afternoon of opening day, the players rode on a West Point fire engine, preceded by the high-school band, in a parade through the Valley. I climbed into a little two-seater Piper Cub and flew over the towns, one hand holding open the door and the other tossing out flyers promoting the game, while the plane dipped and swooped. Fortunately, I went up on an empty stomach; when we landed I was as green as the outfield grass.

There were prizes every night for lucky scorecard numbers: pens, lamps, dishes, radios, little ballplayer pins, even a television set. We had a cow-milking contest for the players, crowned a Miss Valley Rebel, and elected a Number One fan, whose prize turned out to be the least-valuable prize ever won—a lifetime pass to the Rebels’ games.

We had kids’ nights that drew over 200 youngsters free and brought almost 700 paid adults through the gates—and greatly increased the concessions sales. After June 30th all kids wearing a $1 Valley Rebel T-shirt came in free to all games. Fat Man’s Night (remember this was 1951) admitted free anyone denting the scale at the gate for more than 200 pounds; 85 qualified. An old-timers game between the Rebels and local diamond heroes of yore drew 913.

We were in first place on July 4th and hosted the league all-star game, but the league was already on life support. Our attendance was averaging about 600, a little more than half of what it would take to break even. At that, we were drawing better than anybody else in the league, except maybe Rome, a city of about 30,000.

By then, Opelika had thrown in the Cannon towel, and 10 days later Alexander City would do the same. So the league directors split the season. Griffin won the first half by a game over LaGrange and us. LaGrange won the second half. There were no playoffs.

In May I had set out to break the single-game attendance record for a Class D club. But the National Association had no idea what the record was. They received attendance reports by leagues, not individual clubs. I went ahead anyhow and launched a three-month campaign of advance sales. The target game was August 16.

On August 14th National Association president George M. Trautman came to the Valley and sat in our “Jury Box,” a section of the third-base bleachers I had set aside for a bunch of regulars who were the most vocal riders of players and umpires. A photo of Trautman in the Jury Box ran in The Sporting News on August 29, 1951. Two nights later our “record-breaker” didn’t break any records that we knew of, but we did sell 2,428 tickets. The season—and my job—ended on August 25. The Georgia-Alabama League never saw another season.

Then there was a fracas in Korea, and I spent the next four years working in the farm system of the U. S. Air Force. When I came out of the service in 1956, I became the business manager of the Milwaukee Braves’ Class C farm at Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the Northern League for two years. That’s where my friendship began with Roland Hemond, who worked in the Braves’ minor-league office. During the season I hosted a weekly 15-minute TV show, “Let’s Talk Baseball,” featuring a different player each week. One of those players was a fast-talking, sharp-dressing, .171-hitting catcher, Bob Uecker. (He improved to .284 the next year.) In 1958, I moved to the Knoxville Smokies in the Class A Sally League. By 1959 I realized that moving up the ladder to the major leagues meant constantly moving from one rented apartment and city to another, something I had been doing between the service and baseball for the last eight years. I was no longer a boy wonder. And the opportunities had shrunk. Minor-league baseball had been hit by the spread of major-league radio and television broadcasts. Expanded television programming and the increased availability of home air conditioning kept people at home during cold April and hot mid-summer evenings. Whereas fifty-one minor leagues operated in 1951, only twenty-one opened the season in 1959.

My baseball travels were over. I’m glad I made them.

NORMAN L. MACHT has been a SABR member since 1985. He is currently living in 1934 in volume 2 of his biography of Connie Mack.

Notes

1 New York Times, 11 April 1949.

According to the Constitution, “it has been a daily occurrence for crowds to gather around the window and gaze admiringly upon the graceful forms depicted by the photographer’s art. All sorts of people have been there, from the ragged boot black to the merchant prince.”

A captain in the Atlanta police department examined the pictures but lodged no charges. The Constitution, however, was determined to make the most of this small sensation, reporting that “a number of staid citizens have expressed themselves as being opposed to the exhibition of the pictures, and have declared their intention to request Mayor Hillyer to interfere. It is claimed by these citizens that the pictures are indecent.”

The Constitution also reported that New York City newspapers, aided by Anthony Comstock, an agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice, had joined in a crusade in that city against the photographs, while the cigarette dealers responded that the pictures were no more immoral or indecent than the pictures of wellknown actresses exhibited in the bars of leading hotels. Atlanta cigarette dealers followed the same line of argument, declaring that “several of the Atlanta photographers exhibit pictures similar to those of the female baseball players, and that if the latter should be suppressed, so should the former.”

The Constitution also reported that an unidentified but prominent lawyer from a Georgia community had attempted to buy a set of the pictures. When he was told that they were not for sale but were given to tobacco dealers to be used as advertisements, he represented himself as a tobacco dealer who wanted a few sets for advertising purposes. “All right,” said the agent, “buy five or ten thousand cigarettes and I’ll give you half a dozen sets.” Away went the lawyer under a cloud.

That tale was but a puff of smoke compared to widely circulated rumors, again picked up from New York newspapers and repeated by the Constitution, that rich old bachelors who had sought out the girls (who had been portrayed in another set of advertisements as “cigarette makers” rather than female ball players) had suffered disappointments leading to suicides.

The Constitution reporter, at least, finished with a note of realism, writing: “For the benefit of the dudes, it may be said that the cigarette pictures in no instance represent real cigarette makers. They are all taken in New York, from young women specially employed to sit for them.” Or, in the case of the supposed female ball players, to stand for them.

RICHARD MCBANE, a retired newspaperman, is the author of “Glory Days: The Akron Yankees of the Middle Atlantic League, 1935–1941” (Summit County Historical Society, 1997), and “A Fine-Looking Lot of Ball Tossers: The Remarkable Akrons of 1881” (McFarland, 2005).

Notes

1 Atlanta Constitution, 16 July 1886, 7. This is the sole source for this account.

Mann, the leader of a group of businessmen who had purchased the club from the Coca-Cola Company in August 1949, had two tasks for the offseason. He wanted to establish a major-league affiliation for the Crackers, who were the only team in the Southern Association without one, and he had to find a new manager. He hoped for the Crackers to have a working agreement with the New York Giants, with whom he was negotiating, but the deal fell through. Mann was also unsuccessful in securing his first choice to manage the club. He wanted Mel Ott, but the former Giants skipper was not interested.[fn]New York World Telegram, 6 December 1949.[/fn] When Mann learned that the recently retired outfielder Dixie Walker was available, he offered him the job. On December 5, 1949, Walker signed to manage the Crackers for the 1950 season. “We are happy to have Dixie back in Dixie,” said Mann.[fn]Hartford Courant, 6 December 1949.[/fn]

Walker, a native of Villa Rica, Georgia, had ended his 18-year career after two seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Before that, he had played for the Yankees, Tigers, White Sox, and, most famously, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Playing for the Dodgers from 1939 to 1947, he had earned a reputation as the most popular player ever to wear a Brooklyn uniform. During that time, he helped lead the Dodgers to two pennants (1941 and 1947) and had won the National League batting championship in 1944 and the runs-batted-in title in 1945. He finished his career with more than two thousand hits and an excellent lifetime batting average of .306. 

The arrival in 1947 of Jackie Robinson had posed a dilemma for Walker. Like many Southern-born players, and quite a few from the North, Walker did not approve of Robinson’s joining the Dodgers. The primary reason for his opposition, he would later say, was the fear of how playing with a black man would affect his business interests back home in Birmingham, Alabama. He asked team president Branch Rickey to trade him, which Rickey agreed to do, but Walker was himself still a very valuable asset, and when Rickey could not get fair value for him, no trade was made. 

So Walker remained in Brooklyn, and while he and Robinson had an uneasy relationship, there were no incidents and the two men were instrumental in the Dodgers winning the 1947 pennant. Dixie told Rickey he was sorry about having asked for the trade and that he wished to remain with Brooklyn in 1948. But the Dodgers had a stable of young outfielders, and Rickey saw no future for Walker as a player in Brooklyn. However, aware of Walker’s baseball acumen and wanting to keep him in the organization, Rickey offered Dixie a job managing the St. Paul Saints, Brooklyn’s affiliate in the American Association. 

Walker had long expressed an interest in managing, and he had spent the previous few years of his career studying the game from a managerial viewpoint. Nevertheless, he felt that he still had some playing time left and turned down the offer. Rickey sent him to the Pirates in December 1947, where he had a good year in 1948 but struggled in 1949. The Pirates released him at the end of the season, and now at age 39, he was ready to become a manager.

“This is a great opportunity for me. It is what I have always wanted to do when my playing days were at an end,” said Walker.[fn]Ibid.[/fn] “I’m gonna see what I can do with this old cerebellum,” he said tapping his head. “Shucks, I’ve been squinting at fast balls in the twilight and chasing fly balls back to the screen long enough.”[fn]Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 29 January 1950.[/fn]

In his 18-year big-league career, Dixie had played under a variety of managers: Joe McCarthy with the Yankees, Mickey Cochrane and Del Baker with the Tigers, Jimmy Dykes with the White Sox, and Leo Durocher and Burt Shotton with the Dodgers. His greatest success had come under Durocher, but he said that he had no particular model in mind. “I hope I have learned something from each of them that will help me as a manager.”[fn]Guy Tiller, “Prospect for Majors: Dixie Walker,” Baseball Digest, October 1950, 86.[/fn]

One thing that Walker had learned was the importance of a strong pitching staff, and so not long after he got the job with Atlanta, he headed to Buchanan, Georgia, to ask his former teammate Whitlow Wyatt, now 42, to be his pitching coach. Wyatt and Walker had both come to Brooklyn in 1939 after stints with three different American League teams. The new president of the Dodgers, Larry MacPhail, was signing every player he thought had even an outside chance of bringing his team back to respectability. With Walker and Wyatt, he struck gold. The two would be Dodger teammates for six years and in 1941 played instrumental roles in bringing Brooklyn its first National League pennant in 21 years. Wyatt agreed to come out of retirement and work as Dixie’s pitching coach and chief assistant. “The Boston Braves,” said Mann, referring to Atlanta’s new major-league affiliation, “are tickled to get Whit into the system.”[fn]Hartford Courant, 1 March 1950.[/fn]

Two days after landing Wyatt, Walker drove to the Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, where he paid a visit to Hugh Casey, another former Brooklyn teammate. Casey too had joined the Dodgers in 1939 and pitched for them through 1948, with the exception of three wartime years in the U.S. Navy. Casey was moderately successful as a starting pitcher in his first three years with Brooklyn. In 1942, Dodgers manager Durocher shifted him to the bullpen full-time, where he emerged as the National League’s best relief pitcher. After a poor, injury-riddled season in 1948, the Dodgers decided that he was no longer big- league quality and let him go. He signed with Pittsburgh and had a combined 5–1 record for the Pirates and Yankees in 1949, although he did not pitch well for either team. The Yanks released him after the season. But Walker believed that Casey could still be an effective pitcher, at least at the Double A level, and signed him to pitch for the Crackers. For the Atlanta-born Casey, this would be his third stint with the Crackers. He had gone 0–3 for them as an 18-year-old in 1932 and 8–6 two years later.

Not much was expected of the Atlanta club at the start of spring training, but Walker was not discouraged. He spent most of his time at training camp teaching what he knew best—hitting—and while he turned his pitchers over to Wyatt, he was not without his own thoughts on the subject. “More pitchers get sore arms because their legs are not in condition than for any other reason,” Dixie said. Wyatt agreed. “A pitcher can never do too much running. I realized that early on in my career, and I guess that’s why I lasted as long as I did.”[fn]Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 March 1950.[/fn]

Many experts had labeled Casey a “has-been,” and his early spring performances seemed to prove them correct. The 36-year-old veteran was hit hard in his first couple of exhibition appearances against majorleague teams, including an embarrassing outing against the Dodgers. Casey’s problems continued early in the regular season. The fans booed him and urged Walker to let him go. But his old teammate still had faith in him. “I know he can win,” Walker said.[fn]Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 21 June 1950.[/fn]

Casey eventually did turn it around, and by midsummer Dixie had the Crackers in first place. Cardinals outfielder Harry Walker, at Ebbets Field for a series against Brooklyn, was happy for his brother’s success in Atlanta. “Nobody thought Dixie had a chance to win when he took the job of manager,” Harry said. “But he’s got his kid team right up there fighting for a pennant. I would like to see him make it. I sure would like it.”[fn]Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 26 July 1950.[/fn] 

Well, he did make it. Dixie led the Crackers to a Southern Association best 92–59 record, finishing four games ahead of Birmingham. Atlanta then won four straight over Memphis in the first round of the playoffs but was ousted four games to one by Nashville in the finals. 

The three former Dodgers played significant roles in Atlanta’s success. Wyatt cajoled 92 wins out of a rather nondescript pitching staff, led by Art Fowler with 19 wins and Dick Hoover with 16. Working mostly in relief, Casey led the club in appearances with 45 and compiled a 10–4 record. 

Most of the credit, of course, went to Walker, who in addition to managing, served as the third-base coach. Dixie also played in 39 games, mostly as a pinch hitter, and batted a respectable .273. Walker may have done his best work in coaching Eddie Mathews, a scared young kid with only Class D experience. Under Walker’s tutelage, the 18-year-old third baseman and future Hall of Famer batted .286 with 32 home runs. 

For finishing first with a team given little chance of even having a winning record, Walker won the league’s Manager of the Year award. The difference, according to Atlanta Constitution sportswriter Guy Tiller, was Walker’s “patient and intelligent handling of each player, and his detailed instructions on how to correct faults and avoid mistakes.”[fn]Guy Tiller, “Prospect for Majors: Dixie Walker,” Baseball Digest, October 1950, 85.[/fn] 

Walker managed another two years in Atlanta before he and Mann agreed to part ways. Although thought to be in the running for the open managerial job in Pittsburgh, he lost out to Fred Haney. He took a job as the first-base coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, managed by his old Dodger teammate Eddie Stanky. Walker remained with St. Louis until July 30, when the Cardinals chose him to replace Al Hollingsworth as manager of the Houston Buffs, their affiliate in the Texas League. 

Gene Mauch replaced Walker in Atlanta for a year, and in 1954, the Crackers named Wyatt as their manager. “I guess the best thing that ever happened to me was when Dixie talked me into returning to baseball,” said Wyatt, who had been out of the game until Walker brought him back as the Crackers pitching coach in 1950. “I haven’t regretted a minute of it.”[fn]Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 20 November 1953.[/fn] As Walker had done, Wyatt finished in first place, but unlike Walker, his Crackers also won the playoffs. 

But for Hugh Casey, the third member of the Atlanta Crackers’ Brooklyn connection, 1950 was the end of the line. He tried to rejoin the Dodgers for the 1951 season but failed. No longer involved with baseball, drinking heavily, and plagued by tax problems and a paternity suit, the 37-year-old Casey took his life in an Atlanta hotel on July 3, 1951. The funeral was held the next day, July 4, with Walker and Wyatt serving as pallbearers. Casey was buried beside his parents in Atlanta’s Mount Paran Church of God cemetery. The minister referred to the pressure that the paternity suit had placed on Casey. “You never know what is in a man’s mind at such a time,” he said. “But I think Hugh believed that he had been knocked out of the box, unjustly perhaps, and he didn’t want to go back to the bench.”[fn]New York World-Telegram and Sun, 5 July 1951.[/fn]

After leaving the Crackers, Dixie Walker would spend the rest of his life in baseball, as a manager, coach, and scout. He was 71 when he died in 1982. Whit Wyatt stayed in baseball until 1967, serving as a coach for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Milwaukee Braves, and finished his career, appropriately, with the 1966–67 Atlanta Braves. He died in 1999 at the age of 91.

LYLE SPATZ is the editor of two baseball-record books and author of five books on baseball history, including, with coauthor Steve Steinberg, “1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York” (Nebraska, 2010). He has written baseball widely for books and national periodicals, including “The Washington Post” and “The Baseball Research Journal”.

First base

Johnny Mize—Demorest (172 points; 15 first-place votes)

Among all positions, first base clearly had the strongest contingent of quality candidates. Mize was selected as the All-Time Georgia-born All-Star first baseman by the slimmest margin of all positions. “The Big Cat,” who batted from the left side and was known for his power and quickness, played fifteen seasons in the major leagues, beginning with the Cardinals in 1936. During his time with the Cardinals (1936–1941), he led the National League in slugging percentage (SLG) and on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) for three consecutive seasons (1938–1940). Traded to the Giants after the 1941 season, Mize called the Polo Grounds home for five seasons (not including the three years he served in the military during World War II). In his first full season back (1947), Mize led the National League with 51 home runs, 138 RBI, and 137 runs scored. Sold to the Yankees in August 1949, Mize served as a part-time player for the Bronx Bombers through the 1953 season. He hit .312 for his career with 359 home runs, 1,337 RBI, and a .959 OPS.[fn]Some of the less-obvious acronyms utilized in this article and their meanings include: OBP = on-base percentage; SLG = slugging percentage; OPS = on-base percentage + slugging percentage; OPS+ = OPS relative to a player’s league average OPS during the course of his career. An OPS+ of 100 represents an OPS that is equal to the league’s overall OPS during a player’s career; an OPS+ of 125 means a player had an OPS that was 25 percent higher than the overall league OPS during his career. WHIP = number of walks and hits issued by a pitcher per inning pitched; ERA = earned-run average; ERA+ = ERA relative to a pitcher’s league average ERA during the course of his career. An ERA+ of 100 indicates a pitcher’s career ERA was equal to the league’s overall ERA during his career. An ERA+ of 125 means the pitcher’s career ERA was 25 percent better (i.e., lower) that the overall league ERA during that same time span.[/fn] He was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1973 and was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1981. He passed away in 1993 and is buried in Demorest, where Piedmont College maintains a small museum in his honor.

Frank Thomas—Columbus (170; 18) is the reserve first baseman, despite receiving more first-place votes than Mize. “The Big Hurt” was one of the most feared hitters in the American League for most of the 1990s; he hit for a high average with excellent power and a good feel for the strike zone. Many voters chose to discount Thomas as a first baseman, however, because of his many years as a designated hitter and his mediocre defense. Author’s note: If we had included the abomination that is the “designated hitter” on our all-time team, Thomas most certainly would have won the voting for that slot. But I’m writing this article and, therefore, we are not including a designated hitter.

Other first-base finalists receiving votes included Hall of Famer Bill Terry (Atlanta; 150; 10), James “Red” Moore (Atlanta; 8; 1), Ron Fairly (Macon; 7; 0), and Wally Joyner (Atlanta; 4; 0).

Second Base

Jackie Robinson—Cairo (190; 38)

The only surprise in the voting at this position is that Robinson was not a unanimous first choice, receiving just 38 of the 40 first-place votes cast. The two dissenting voters gave no explanation; we can only speculate that they may have penalized Jackie for the brief time he spent in Georgia before his family moved to California. The details of Jackie’s career have been well documented by others; in his 10 seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers, this courageous man hit .311 with a .409 on-base percentage while contributing a formidable mix of speed and power to the Dodger lineup. He was named Rookie of the Year in 1947 and the NL Most Valuable Player in 1949. He earned induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962 and the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1998. He died in 1972 at the age of 53.

Tony Phillips—Atlanta (124; 0) is the reserve second baseman. Phillips enjoyed an 18-year major-league career and was one of the most versatile players in baseball during his time. In addition to second base, Phillips had considerable experience at short, third, and in the outfield. He was one of the better lead-off hitters of his time with some pop in his bat and good speed.

Other finalists receiving votes were Jeff Treadway (Columbus; 21; 1) and Roy Hartsfield (Chattahoochee; 13; 1).

Shortstop

Cecil Travis—Riverdale (199; 39)

Many people do not realize just how good Cecil Travis was. Prior to World War II, the Senators’ shortstop was a three-time All-Star with a .327 cumulative batting average and an OPS+ of 113. In 1941, his finest season, he hit .359, drove in 101 runs, posted an OPS of .930 (OPS+ = 150), and led the American League with 218 hits. Like so many of his peers, Travis sacrificed almost four full years of his life and career to serve his country during World War II. Returning to the Senators late in the 1945 season, Cecil was only a shell of his former self as a player. He hit just .241 in his three seasons after the war and retired after the 1947 season, finishing with an overall career batting average of .314. Many observers believe that the war cost Travis a place in the Hall of Fame (see his pre- and postwar statistics below) and blame his decline on the frostbite he suffered to his feet during the war, although he downplayed that excuse and blamed it instead on his inability to get his timing back after being away from the game for so long. He was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1975 and passed away in 2006. He is buried in Atlanta.

Cecil Travis’s Prewar and Postwar Splits

Bucky “Bleepin’” Dent—Savannah (100; 4) is the reserve shortstop. With the possible exceptions of Bobby Thomson and Bill Mazeroski, no player secured his place in baseball history as the result of one timely home run more so than Bucky Dent. The Red Sox Nation curses his name to this day (thus the nickname). The three-time All-Star was named World Series MVP in 1978.

Other finalists receiving votes included Negro Leaguer Pee Wee Butts (Sparta; 48; 0), Stephen Drew (Hahira; 17; 1), Desi Relaford (Valdosta; 8; 0), Ernest Riles (Cairo; 4; 0), and Adam Everett (Austell; 4; 0).

Third Base

Ray Knight—Albany (199; 35)

Third base is the weakest position for Georgia-born players. Our ballot contained a number of candidates but no Hall of Fame–caliber option. Ray Knight, our All-Time Georgia-born third baseman, had a solid if unspectacular career with five teams from 1974–1988. An average fielder, Knight was a career .271 hitter with modest power and no speed. He probably is best remembered for his role in helping the Mets win the 1986 World Series and being named series MVP. He was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1995 and is married to professional golf legend Nancy Lopez.

Chone Figgins (127; 7) from Leary, Georgia, is our reserve third baseman. Figgins, who is now with the Seattle Mariners, began his career with the Anaheim Angels. A versatile fielder with a good bat and excellent speed, Figgins is, in the eyes of many voters, on the verge of supplanting Knight as the All-Time Georgia-born All-Star third baseman.

Other finalists receiving votes included Russ Branyan (Warner Robins; 24; 0) and Willie Greene (Milledgeville; 8; 0).

Catcher

Josh Gibson—Buena Vista (199; 39)

Negro League legend Josh Gibson is our All-Time Georgia-born All-Star catcher. Many experts consider Gibson, a star with the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords, the most outstanding hitter in the history of the Negro Leagues. He matched prodigious power with an excellent eye at the plate and defensively was compared favorably to Yankee Hall of Famer Bill Dickey. He died of the effects of an untreated brain tumor in January 1947, just three months before Jackie Robinson took the field for the Dodgers. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972 and the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 2003.

Athens’s Brian McCann (129; 2), who was selected to the National League All-Star team in each of his first four full seasons, is the backup catcher. McCann is good for 20 home runs and 90 RBI a year and may exceed those numbers with more experience. His catching skills are adequate, although he struggles with pitches in the dirt and is working hard to improve his throwing.

Other finalists receiving votes included Negro League star Quincy Trouppe (Dublin; 81; 0), Ivey Wingo (Gainesville; 29; 0), Jody Davis (Gainesville; 26; 0), Michael Barrett (Atlanta; 10; 0), Negro Leaguer Joe Greene (Stone Mountain; 10; 0), Joe Tipton (McCaysville; 5; 1), and Bill Cash (Round Oak; 3; 0).

Outfield

Ty Cobb—Narrows (205; 41)

Moises Alou—Atlanta (119; 0)

Fred “Dixie” Walker—Villa Rica (100; 0)

Ty Cobb was the only unanimous selection for this team. He was the only player to be named on every ballot for a given position, and he was every voters’ first choice.

Cobb’s reputation as a fierce and combative competitor is well documented; he was arguably the game’s greatest player in the first 25 years of the modern era. A member of the inaugural class of inductees to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936, he died in Atlanta in 1961 and is buried in Royston, Georgia. He was elected to the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1964. A generous donation from Cobb after his playing days were over helped fund a hospital in Royston, and today the Ty Cobb Healthcare System operates the Ty Cobb Museum there.

Moises Alou was born in Atlanta in 1966, when his father, Felipe, played for the Braves. He played for his father early in his career when Felipe managed the Montreal Expos. Moises signed with the Florida Marlins as a free agent after the 1996 season and was a key contributor to the Marlins’ world championship that in 1997. Traded to Houston after the World Series in a salary purge by Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga, the six-time All-Star had a number of productive years with the Astros, Cubs, and Giants before finishing his career with the Mets in 2007–2008.

Dixie Walker, who finished third in the outfield voting, came from a baseball family. His father, Ewart (also known as “Dixie”), pitched briefly for the Senators during the deadball era, and his brother Harry “The Hat” Walker also enjoyed a distinguished major-league career. After stints with the Yankees, White Sox, and Tigers, Dixie developed a loyal fan base while playing for Brooklyn in the 1940s, when he was a five-time All-Star. Dubbed “The People’s Choice” by Brooklyn fans, Walker batted .311 in 1941 and led all NL outfielders in assists while leading the Dodgers to the NL pennant that year. He won the NL batting title in 1944 and led the league in RBI in 1945. One of the most vocal opponents of Branch Rickey’s plan to add Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers’ roster in 1947, Walker was traded to the Pirates after that season, but not before he recognized Robinson’s skill and contributions to the Dodgers’ success. He later managed the Atlanta Crackers to the 1950 Southern Association pennant. He passed away in 1982 in Birmingham, Alabama.

The reserve outfielders include Marquis Grissom (Atlanta; 51; 0) and Wally Moses (Uvalda; 48; 0). Grissom led the NL in stolen bases twice early in his career, and he has won four Gold Glove awards for his outfield play. Moses played for three different teams during a 17-year career in the AL. He batted over .300 in each of his first seven seasons, although he reached double figures in home runs just once (25 in 1937), the same year he established his single-season high in RBI (86). He also exhibited good speed on the bases. He was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1989 and passed away in 1990, just two days after his 80th birthday.

Other finalists receiving votes in the outer gardens included J. D. Drew (Valdosta[fn]At the time of the voting, various reference sources listed J.D. Drew’s birthplace as Valdosta, Georgia. That information has since been corrected to reflect his birth in Tallahassee, Florida.[/fn]; 20; 0), Mike Cameron (LaGrange; 7; 0), Harry “Suitcase” Simpson (Atlanta; 6; 0), Nick Markakis (Woodstock; 5; 0), Rondell White (Milledgeville; 4; 0), and Negro Leaguer Eddie Dwight (Dalton; 4; 0).

Starting Pitchers

Kevin Brown—Milledgeville (153; 20)

Tim Hudson—Columbus (102; 4)

Spud Chandler—Commerce (93; 6)

Dick Redding—Atlanta (77; 6)

Kenny Rogers—Savannah (68; 1)

A six-time All-Star, Kevin Brown holds down the number-one spot in our All-Time Georgia-born All-Star starting rotation. A product of Georgia Tech, Brown won 21 games for Texas in 1992 and went to the World Series with the Florida Marlins in 1997, although he did not pitch well in the Series. After leading the Padres to the World Series in 1998, he signed a controversial $105 million, seven-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1999. Over the next five seasons, Brown went 58–32 (.644), although the Dodgers failed to make the postseason during that time. Brown finished out his career in 2005 with a disappointing season for the New York Yankees. He was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 2007.

In just his second year in the majors, Tim Hudson of the Oakland A’s led the AL with twenty wins in 2000 and finished second in the Cy Young voting. A product of Auburn University and a two-time All-Star with the A’s, Hudson was traded to the Atlanta Braves prior to the 2005 season. Although he has pitched well for the Braves, he has not quite lived up to expectations. Tommy John surgery sidelined him for the last half of the 2008 season and most of the 2009 campaign. A free agent after 2009, Hudson re-signed with the Braves for 2010 and is expected to compensate for the loss of starter Javier Vasquez, who was traded to the Yankees in the offseason. Relying on a sinking fastball and a splitter, Hudson’s .655 lifetime winning percentage through the 2009 season ranked fifth highest among active pitchers.

Spurgeon “Spud” Chandler, a University of Georgia alumnus, spent five years in the minor leagues after graduation and did not make his major-league debut until the age of 29. He pitched just 11 seasons in the major leagues, all for the New York Yankees. His .717 lifetime winning percentage is second all-time behind the nineteenth-century star Albert Spalding (.795) and just ahead of Dave Foutz’ and Whitey Ford’s mark of .690. He led the American League with a 20–4 record and 1.64 ERA (ERA+ = 197) in 1943, winning the AL MVP award in the process. He was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1969 and passed away in 1990 in Florida.

A tall (6’4?) right-hander, “Cannonball” Dick Redding was a pitching sensation for a number of teams in black baseball in the days before the establishment of organized black leagues. Using a no-windup delivery and relying primarily on a blazing fastball, he threw 30 no-hitters, although many of those masterpieces were against inferior clubs. Pitching for the Lincoln Stars in 1915, Redding won 20 straight games at one point and jumped to the Lincoln Giants late in the season, where he went 3–1 in the playoffs against the Chicago American Giants.[fn]See Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, 654.[/fn] After parts of two seasons in the military during World War I, Redding continued to pitch and manage various teams in the Negro leagues through the 1920s, although his effectiveness as a pitcher waned significantly as that decade unfolded. He died in New York in 1948.

Kenny Rogers pitched in the major leagues for twenty years, primarily in the American League. He threw a perfect game for the Rangers in 1994 and earned his first All-Star appearance in 1995 with a 17–7 record for Texas. Signing with the Yankees as a free agent in 1996, Rogers had two nondescript years with the Yankees, including a horrendous postseason in 1996. He suffered through another horrible postseason during a brief stay with the Mets in 1999 before returning to Texas for the 2000 season. He was selected to the American League All-Star team two more times (2004-5) while with the Rangers, and he was the starting pitcher in the 2006 All-Star game after he had moved to the Tigers. That same year, he won three games for the Tigers in postseason play. He finished his career with the Tigers in 2008.

Other finalists receiving votes included Nap Rucker (Crabapple; 16.5; 1), Bill Byrd (Canton; 11; 0), Jim Bagby Sr. (Barnett; 8.33; 0), Whitlow Wyatt (Kensington; 8.33; 0), John “Blue Moon” Odom (Macon; 6; 0), Jim Hearn (Atlanta; 5.33; 0), Erskine Mayer (Atlanta; 4; 0), Connie Johnson (Stone Mountain; 4; 0), Adam Wainwright (Brunswick; 3; 0), and Felix Evans (Atlanta; 2; 0), while Tom Cheney (Morgan) Phil Douglas (Cedartown), Willard Nixon (Taylorsville), Tully Sparks (Etna), and Roy Welmaker (Atlanta) each received one fifth-place vote. (The top five Georgia-born starters who were not selected to the starting rotation were included on the bullpen ballot.)

Bullpen

Todd Jones—Marietta (151; 21)

Hugh Casey—Atlanta (78; 5)

Nap Rucker—Crabapple (68; 6)

Jonathan Broxton—Augusta (50; 2)

Jim Bagby Sr.—Barnett (49; 2)

Todd Jones saved 319 games over the course of a 16-year career that came to a close with the Tigers in 2008. He was on an All-Star team for the only time in his career in 2000 and won the American League Rolaids Relief Award that year for posting 42 saves for Detroit.

Hugh Casey pitched for just nine seasons in the major leagues, mostly with Brooklyn during the 1940s. He was the unfortunate victim of Mickey Owen’s untimely passed ball on a third strike to Tommy Henrich with two outs in the ninth inning in Game 4 of the 1941 World Series. Henrich reached first and Casey collapsed, allowing the Yankees four runs and losing the game 7–4. A retroactive application of the saves criteria revealed that Casey led the NL in saves in 1942 and 1947 with 13 and 18, respectively. Casey developed a serious problem with alcohol and committed suicide in Atlanta in 1951, two years after his major-league career came to a close with the Yankees. He is buried in Atlanta and was elected to the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1991.

Nap Rucker was a highly regarded southpaw who posted a career record of 134–134 over the course of ten seasons for a bad Brooklyn club during the deadball era. He pitched a no-hitter against the Boston Braves in 1908. By the time the Brooklyn club made its first World Series appearance in 1916, Rucker’s career was coming to a close. He appeared in just nine games that year and pitched two scoreless innings in the World Series, which was won by the Red Sox. He was elected to the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1967 and was buried in Roswell, Georgia, after passing away in 1970.

Jonathan Broxton has established himself as a dominant closer after just five seasons in the major leagues. He has averaged almost 12 strikeouts per nine innings for his career. He was credited with 36 saves in 2009 while averaging an incredible 13.5 strikeouts per nine innings.

Jim Bagby Sr. won 31 games, including six in relief, for the world-champion Cleveland Indians in 1920. He was on the mound when Bill Wambsganss completed his historic unassisted triple play in the Indians’ win over Brooklyn in Game 5 of that year’s World Series. Bagby pitched just nine seasons in the major leagues and finished with an overall record of 127-89 (.588). He died in Marietta, Georgia, in 1954 and is buried in Atlanta’s Westview Cemetery.

Other bullpen finalists receiving votes included Rick Camp (Trion; 48; 0), Matt Capps (Douglasville; 28; 0), Whitlow Wyatt (Kensington; 28; 0), Bill Byrd (Canton; 23; 1), Jim Hearn (Atlanta; 22; 2), John Rocker (Statesboro; 22; 0), Connie Johnson (Stone Mountain; 7; 0), Chris Hammond (Atlanta; 7; 0), Dave Beard (Atlanta; 3; 0), and Willard Nixon (Taylorsville; 2; 0).

Manager

Bill Terry (Atlanta; 28 votes)

Although he missed election at first base, “Memphis Bill” Terry is the All-Time Georgia-born All-Star manager. He led the New York Giants to three pennants and one World Series title in 10 years as manager, amassing an overall record of 823–661, a winning percentage of .555. He was elected to the Hall of Fame (as a player) in 1954. He is the last National Leaguer to hit .400 (1930). He died in 1989 in Jacksonville, Florida.

Other managerial finalists receiving votes included George Stallings (8) and Ty Cobb (1).

All-Time Georgia-Born All-Star Roster

I thought it would be interesting to compile a hypothetical staring lineup from the first-place finishers at each position (see the accompanying table). This lineup has the potential to score a lot of runs. With the possible exception of Ray Knight in the eight hole, there is not a weak spot in the lineup. The trio of Cobb, Robinson, and Dixie Walker at the top of the lineup has a cumulative on-base percentage of over .400; moreover, Cobb and Robinson’s speed and daring on the bases undoubtedly would serve as a major distraction to opposing pitchers. While we can only speculate as to Josh Gibson’s success as a major-league hitter, the consensus of baseball historians, not to mention those who played with Josh or who saw him play, is that he had all the tools to be a major-league star had he been given the opportunity to showcase his skills. Gibson and Johnny Mize, who both hit for power and average, provide big bats in the middle of the lineup. Moises Alou, with his combination of good contact and decent power and speed, offers Mize some protection. Cecil Travis—especially the pre-war Travis—is a difficult out in the seventh spot. Ray Knight may not measure up to the others in this lineup, but neither is he an automatic out. He was a good, if not great, player.

The reserve roster combines decent hitting, good power, and considerable speed. Frank Thomas—“The Big Hurt”—is the only superstar; he offers a unique combination of power and high on-base percentage off the bench. Tony Phillips and Chone Figgins, in addition to being good offensive players with speed, provide considerable defensive flexibility as well, as both of them are capable of playing multiple positions, including the outfield. Either could fill in at third base for Ray Knight (as could both Jackie Robinson and Cecil Travis). Marquis Grissom and Wally Moses provide capable offense and speed as outfield alternatives. Brian McCann is one of the best hitters in the current generation of catchers. Bucky Dent is a good fielder with below-average offensive spark.

The starting rotation has a formidable track record. As a unit, Kevin Brown, Tim Hudson, Spud Chandler, and Kenny Rogers have a lifetime winning percentage of .620 (687–421). Rogers is the only southpaw in the rotation, however. The impact of Cannonball Dick Redding is, once again, left to the imagination. Redding’s reputation as one of the best pitchers in black baseball prior to the formation of formal league structures suggests that he could have certainly held his own against major-league hitters of his time.

The bullpen contains a combination of modern-day “closer” types and old-school relievers. With Jones and Broxton available to close, Hugh Casey falls into the role of “setup man.” They are joined by two pitchers from a generation long past: Jim Bagby Sr. and Nap Rucker spent most of their careers as starting pitchers, but they also worked in relief when necessary, and for our purposes they fall into the role of long relievers (with an occasional spot start).

The All-Time Georgia-born All-Star team is formidable. Including the manager, it contains five members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame (Cobb, Robinson, Gibson, Mize, and Terry) and twelve members of the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame (Cobb, Robinson, Gibson, Mize, Travis, Knight, Moses, Brown, Chandler, Casey, Rucker, and Bagby). While many selections, such as Robinson, Travis, Cobb, and Gibson are not surprising, other positions offer plenty of room for debate. First base was a particularly close contest: the relative merits of Mize, Thomas, and Terry can be argued for hours. Such debate is what makes baseball—and SABR—so appealing.

TERRY W. SLOOPE has served as the Magnolia Chapter’s regional chair for more than ten years. He has been working on a biographical project about Cartersville’s Rudy York for longer than that.

References and Suggested Reading

Clark, Dick, and Larry Lester, eds. The Negro Leagues Book. Cleveland, Oh.: Society for American Baseball Research, 2004.

Creamer, Robert W. Baseball in ’41: A Celebration of the “Best Baseball Season Ever”—In the Year America Went to War. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Enders, Eric. “George Napoleon Rucker.” In Deadball Stars of the National League, ed. Tom Simon, 283–286. Dulles, Va.: Brasseys, 2006.

Ginsburg, Daniel. “Tyrus Raymond Cobb.” In Deadball Stars of the American League, ed. David Jones, 546–550. Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006.

Hogan, Lawrence D., ed. Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2007.

Holway, John. Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1992. See the chapters on Georgia natives William “Sug” Cornelius, James “Joe” Greene, and Tom “Pee Wee” Butts. These and many of the other chapters also contain a significant amount of information about Josh Gibson.

James, Bill. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. New York: The Free Press, 2001.

James, Bill, and Rob Neyer. The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers: An Historical Compendium of Pitching, Pitchers, and Pitches. New York: Fireside Books, 2004.

Kavanaugh, Jack. “Dixie Walker—The Peepul’s Cherce.” Baseball Research Journal 22 (1993): 80.

Kirkpatrick, Rob. Cecil Travis of the Washington Senators: The War-Torn Career of an All-Star Shortstop. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Knight, Tom. “Uncle Robbie and Hugh Casey.” Baseball Research Journal 22 (1993): 105.

Kohout, Martin. “George Tweedy Stallings.” In Deadball Stars of the National League, ed. Tom Simon, 323–324. Dulles, Va.: Brasseys, 2004.

Pietrusza, David, Mathew Silverman, and Michael Gershman, eds. Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia. Total Sports Illustrated, 2000.

Rampersand, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Ribowsky, Mark. A Complete History of the Negro Leagues, 1884–1955. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1995.

——. The Power and the Darkness: The Life of Josh Gibson in the Shadows of the Game. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Riley, James A. The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994.

Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. Expanded ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

www.baseball-reference.com

SABR’s Bioproject website (http://sabr.org/bioproject) has biographical profiles of a number of Georgia natives, including:

• Jim Bagby Sr. by Stephen Constantelos
• Ty Cobb by Dan Ginsburg
• Wally Moses by Doug Skipper
• Jackie Robinson by Rick Swaine
• Nap Rucker by Eric Enders
• Bill Terry by Fred Stein
• Cecil Travis by Rob Kirkpatrick

As his star rose in the major leagues, theatrical producers began approaching Cobb and proposing that he enter vaudeville or tour in a play. As early as 1907, the media reported that the Detroit Tigers’ flychaser was regularly turning down such bids. Cobb himself explained that he had “often received offers to go before the footlights, but realizing that I am a ball player and not an actor, I declined all these propositions.” In contrast to his celebrated on-field ferociousness, he feared that a poorly received performance might make him a laughingstock. 

All this changed in the summer of 1911. Cobb would finish the season leading the American League with 248 hits, 47 doubles, 24 triples, 127 RBIs, 147 runs scored, a .621 slugging percentage, and a .420 batting average. But before the campaign’s end, he was approached by Vaughan Glaser, an actor-director who then was performing in and managing a Southern-based stock company. Glaser is one of countless long-forgotten theater professionals who toiled for decades on the fringes of the limelight, appearing in scores of stock productions. In 1938, he won fleeting mainstream notoriety when he originated the role of Mr. Bradley, a high school principal, in the Broadway production of What a Life — the Clifford Goldsmith comedy that introduced to the world a brash, awkward teenager by the name of Henry Aldrich. The following year, Glaser was cast as Bradley in the screen version of What a Life and reprised the part in Paramount’s subsequent Henry Aldrich film series. He also was seen in two Alfred Hitchcock features, Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1942), and had small roles in three baseball-related films: Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), whose title character, played by Gary Cooper, is a lanky ex-bush league hurler; the Lou Gehrig biography The Pride of the Yankees (1942), also featuring Cooper; and Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), which opens with an Ebbets Field sequence that is a must-see for Brooklyn Dodgers aficionados. 

FROM BALL FIELD TO FOOTLIGHTS 

Glaser had known Cobb for several years, during which he had been constantly bugging the ballplayer to appear in one of his productions. Now, at last, Cobb relented. According to the Atlanta Constitution, he acquiesced because Glaser’s wife “revealed to him that he possessed natural talents as an actor.” But he more likely agreed for a more practical — and altogether different — reason. At the time, Cobb was not a wealthy man. He had not yet amassed his fortune by investing in real estate, playing the financial markets, and accumulating Coca-Cola Company stock. But now he was married and starting a family, and he certainly could use the extra cash. So he agreed to tour in a Glaser-mounted stage production that would begin at the end of the baseball season. His salary for the tour reportedly was in the $10,000 range: certainly a handsome sum for 1911-12, and far more than Cobb ever could earn accepting the kind of working person’s job that many big leaguers then undertook during the off-season. 

In early July, Sporting Life reported that Cobb “was seriously considering an offer to go on stage next Winter. . . . Several prominent theatrical men and outfielder Jimmy Callahan are said to be interested in the venture.” The deal became official in August. The production Glaser handpicked for the ballplayer was The College Widow, a comedy written by George Ade, which had lasted 278 performances when it debuted on Broadway in 1904. The plot centers on Billy Bolton, a star footballer who is intent on playing for Bingham College. Jane Witherspoon, the resourceful daughter of the head man at Atwater College, Bingham’s archrival, schemes to convince Billy to join her school’s team. As the story progresses, romance blossoms between heroine and hero. 

Cobb had seen a production of The College Widow in Detroit three years before and believed that, given his public persona, the play was an appropriate choice. When the tour was in its planning stages, Glaser briefly considered transforming Billy Bolton into a flychaser but decided to maintain the original characterization. After a brief rehearsal period, the tour began in early November. Its first stop was the Taylor Opera House in Newark, New Jersey. Also cast in the production was another big-leaguer, albeit one who would transcend the fame of Jimmy Callahan. Glaser signed Shoeless Joe Jackson, who had just completed his first full season in the American League. Jackson was to appear in a supporting role, as a heavy, but his run was short-lived. “Just before the curtain was hoisted on the first night,” Sporting Life reported, “Joe got to thinking of old Greenville, South Carolina, where everybody knows him, and he decided to go there instead of upon the stage.” 

Unlike Jackson, Cobb was determined to stick with the show. Throughout its run, audiences regularly applauded him not so much for his acting ability as his mere presence. While no John Barrymore, Cobb did not embarrass himself onstage. One of the first reviews of the production, which appeared in the Trenton True American, typified most of those that followed. “Not content with grabbing the top-most twig of laurel in the baseball world,” the paper reported, “Ty Cobb . . . broke into the theatrical world last night . . . and, though he swung at some wild ones, managed to connect for a ‘Baker’ before the game ended . . . The ‘Georgia Peach’ isn’t attempting to elevate the stage. He is out for the money, but, be it said to his credit, he is no lemon when it comes to the histrionic.” Bert Cowan, who is alternately described as Cobb’s “business manager during that brief fling at acting” and one of the performers in Glaser’s company, noted that the ballplayer-turned-actor was “exceedingly sharp and quick. That was why he was able to handle the acting chore.” 

Several weeks into the tour, Cobb recalled, “Much to my surprise, I managed to get through my first night on the stage without that awful bugaboo, ‘stage fright,’ attacking my heart and dropping me in my tracks. But I had been warned so much regarding such an attack that I made every preparation to guard against it. It was just like figuring out what kind of a ball a pitcher was going to put over. I knew it was coming and waited for it.” Then he added, “A few appearances on the stage gave me reassurance and now I am perfectly at home. I find stage work wonderfully interesting and I like it.” 

One example of how Cobb maintained his stage presence was cited by Vaughan Glaser. In the middle of a performance, Glaser noticed that several sweaters used in the production were missing. He began questioning a stagehand, and his query was met with hostility. Cobb, who was waiting offstage for his cue, overheard the conversation and promptly stepped between Glaser and the stagehand. After knocking down the stagehand, he coolly strode onstage and flawlessly delivered his lines. 

Another incident involving Cobb’s swing-first-and-ask-questions-later behavior occurred during the show’s run at New York’s Lyceum Theater. Without his knowledge, the show’s publicist planted a phony police officer in Central Park, through which the ballplayer was motoring. In his autobiography, My Life in Baseball, Cobb recollected that he was driving at a “moderate pace” when the faux cop stopped him — and informed him that he was under arrest. When he resisted, and the policeman persisted, the Georgia Peach “made a little pugilistic history. When the smoke cleared, the man in blue was sans his helmet and coat and bleeding variously. Picking himself up, he vanished over the horizon.” Cobb was convinced that his action would land him in the clink. But then he spied a photographer lurking in a nearby bush, and he soon realized the incident was a stunt, fashioned to “grab off some Page One space.” 

TOURING ON HOME TURF 

Almost immediately after its premiere, The College Widow troupe headed below the Mason-Dixon Line. As Cobb and company traveled from venue to venue, he was treated like reigning royalty. In Asheville, North Carolina, the Georgia Peach was feted with a preperformance reception and post-performance banquet. The play was booked into two cities in Cobb’s home state: Augusta and Atlanta. The ballplayer then was living in Augusta and the local paper, the Augusta Chronicle, gave the tour maximum coverage. First the Chronicle extensively detailed Cobb’s reception in Newark. Then on November 11, the paper reported that his “friends in Augusta are preparing to give him a rousing reception upon his first appearance here as an actor. He will be at the Grand [Opera House] . . . next Saturday, matinee and night, and will be banqueted several times while in the city. He has friends in Augusta by the hundreds and there will be a fight to see which body of his friends will be able to do the most for him.” In the flurry of items that appeared in the paper during the following week, the tour was dubbed one of the “biggest local events in theatrical history.” The play was described as “Vaughan Glaser’s mammoth revival and artistic production,” “one of the most pleasant plays of the American stage,” and “a story of college life which will remain as long as the American drama exists.” 

Of his acting, the Chronicle gushed that, “without doubt, [Cobb] has been the dramatic find and surprise of the current season.” The paper further reported: 

Since his advent on the stage Cobb has been making a reputation for himself which is second only to [what] he has achieved on the diamond . . . the simple fact that Cobb really acts and acts in a manner which ranks him high in his new calling is very refreshing. . . . His various speeches were delivered in a manner which would have made actors much longer in the business than he, proud of themselves. . . . his natural ease and grace stood him in good stead at all times . . . it might well be said that he is a better ball player than any actor and a better actor than any ball player. 

The Chronicle also noted that, at each performance, “Ty Cobb’s friends turned out in large and enthusiastic numbers, and showed their cordial appreciation of him . . . by heartiest applause upon his every appearance and repeated curtain calls at the end of each act.” One of those in attendance was an American of note who had spent a goodly portion of his childhood in Augusta: Woodrow Wilson, current New Jersey governor and future United States president, who “joined a box party at the Grand” for one of the shows. 

On his arrival in Atlanta, Cobb was welcomed by members of the city’s Ad Men’s Club. A photo of the ballplayer being greeted by the club was printed in the Atlanta Constitution. He also was “the recipient of a great reception” at the Transportation Club, which was attended by 75 community leaders. The show was booked into the Atlanta Theater and, after one performance, the Atlanta Journal gushed that “Tyrus Raymond was compelled to respond to vociferous curtain calls, and his speech, which set everybody laughing, proved his honest appreciation of the welcome accorded him.” The paper added, “Entering the theatrical game without the least training for it Cobb has worked with a true Georgia Spirit.” In a rewording of the Augusta Chronicle reportage, the Atlanta Constitution noted that Cobb “has proven the dramatic find of the year, and it can be truthfully said that he is a better ball/player [sic] than any actor, a better actor than any ball/player [sic] and as good an actor as many who make it their life business.” 

The College Widow then moved on to Nashville’s Vendome Theater. The Nashville Banner reported that Cobb, “the greatest baseball player the world has ever seen . . . is the guest of Nashville [and] was given the royal reception by the people of the city.” During his stay in town, he was afforded the company of various prominent Tennesseans, starting with the state’s governor, Ben W. Hooper. Cobb also attended a couple of Vanderbilt University football scrimmages and, on his second visit, he donned a team uniform, practiced with the players — at one point, he reportedly punted a football for 50 yards “in the face of a brisk breeze” — and sat down for an interview that appeared in the school newspaper. Of his performance, the unidentified Banner writer opined, “On the stage Mr. Cobb is maintaining the same high average that has marked his work on the diamond.” 

Cobb met with similar receptions in other Southern cities — with one glaring exception. The story goes that Allen G. Johnson, sports editor and drama critic of the Birmingham News, instigated the hiring of Cobb as the paper’s sports editor while The College Widow was playing in the Alabama city. A black streamer across the paper’s sports page announced Cobb as the new editor. But the ballplayer’s job consisted of his dictating a statement in which he promised that his Tigers would cop the pennant during the upcoming campaign. 

Even though that day’s paper was a hot-seller, the News’s managing editor was not amused. He promptly ordered Johnson to not just review The College Widow but to offer an honest judgment of Cobb’s thespian abilities. While the ballplayer’s performance earned him a curtain call at the second-act finale, Johnson harshly criticized his acting prowess. Upon learning of the review, Cobb wrote Johnson a cutting missive in which he retorted, “Your criticism is beneath my notice, but I just want you to see what a few real critics say about my work.” Cobb included clippings of previously published critiques and added, “I am a better actor than you are, a better sports editor than you are, a better dramatic critic than you are. I make more money than you do, and I know I am a better ball player — so why should inferiors criticize superiors?” 

With tongue steadfastly planted in cheek, Johnson answered Cobb with a letter of his own in which he declared, “I admit that you are a better critic, actor, sports editor, and money maker than I am, Mr. Cobb, but I refuse to admit that you are a better ball player. I have seen you play ball and know what you can do, but you have never seen me in action on a diamond. Therefore I now challenge you to a game at Rickwood Field, the Birmingham Southern League ball ground, July 4, for the championship of the world. If you do not appear to play me I will claim the championship by forfeit.” Unsurprisingly, Cobb never responded to the challenge. 

HEADING NORTH 

After playing the various Southern cities, The College Widow troupe toured the Midwest. On December 5, the Pittsburgh Leader reported that Cobb’s “coolness, familiarity with the lines, clearness of enunciation and absence of stage fright elicited much applause” during a performance at the Lyceum Theater. However, during one of the Pittsburgh performances, the ballplayer-turned-actor forgot his lines. His wife Charlie and his two children had come to town from Detroit and were seated in an upper box. Upon his initial onstage appearance, Cobb became distracted when Ty Jr., his two-and-a-half-year-old son, blurted out, “Daddy! Daddy!” “I was so confused,” Cobb reported, “I couldn’t say anything, but in the applause that followed I managed to recover.” Several days after the incident, Cobb told the Toledo Times, “I am striving to do my best [onstage] and will continue to do so, just the same as I try to play baseball.” 

After a brief stay in Toledo, the troupe moved on to such venues as Toronto, Kalamazoo, and Detroit (where it followed Germany Schaefer’s vaudeville act into the Lyceum Theater). On the final day of the year, The College Widow entertained an audience in Chicago. By this time, however, Cobb was becoming fatigued by the grind of traveling, performing night after night, and meeting and greeting well-wishers and hangers-on. Additionally, he now was concerned that this routine might negatively impact on his ball playing during the upcoming season. The College Widow was supposed to tour the Eastern United States through March, ending right before the opening of spring training. But after some additional play dates, the last in Cleveland, Cobb ended the show’s run — in mid-January. Even then, the ballplayer and the tour still were earning positive press. “With Ty Cobb as star in a George Ade comedy,” reported the Cleveland Leader on January 9, “the [Cleveland] Lyceum is ‘knocking ‘em off the seats’ . . . the theater was packed last night from boxes to bleachers and ‘Ty’ kept his average well above .400 as Billy Bolton, Atwater College halfback.” 

Cobb explained his reasoning for cutting the tour short by declaring, “Here I am at the end of several months on the boards four pounds under my playing weight when under . . . more natural conditions I should be from five to ten pounds over that notch.” He added, “I am becoming nervous and I miss my regular sleep. It was my ambition . . . to become a good actor, but in attaining that object I see that my usefulness as a baseball player is bound to suffer and so I have decided to cut out the stage for the pastime which first made me the reputation I enjoy.” An anonymous writer in Baseball Magazine noted that, “according to Tyrus, the month of one-night stands which he played through the south was worse than facing Walter Johnson or Russ Ford 154 games in the season.” 

After quitting the show, Cobb returned to Detroit to spend time with his family and rest up for the new season. Overall, he spent ten weeks playing Billy Bolton. “I believe I was fairly successful for a beginner,” Cobb modestly declared afterwards. Decades later, he maintained that the stage actor’s life was tough and demanding. Life on the road “proved to me that actors of my day, more than ballplayers, had to be iron men.” 

Upon reclaiming his spot in the Detroit outfield, Cobb viewed his time in The College Widow as a one-shot experience. In a bylined article published in the New York Times in 1919, Christy Mathewson observed, “Cobb was pretty good as an actor, too. I saw him do it. But I don’t think Ty cared much for the job, from what he told me, and because he never went back after more, in spite of big offers.” 

FROM STAGE TO SCREEN 

Big Six only was partly correct. While Cobb never revisited stage acting, he made a foray into the then-burgeoning motion picture industry His old friend Vaughan Glaser again played a key role in introducing Cobb to the movies. The year was 1916, and Glaser now was the vice president of the Sunbeam Motion Picture Corporation, a newly-formed, New York City-based film production outfit. 

Sunbeam had been incorporated in March “to manufacture, sell, and deal in and with motion picture films of all kinds.” Its capitalization was listed at $2.5 million, and the company soon began running newspaper ads soliciting investors to purchase stock at $5 per share. One such ad in the July 12 issue of the Pittsburgh Gazette Times announced “Work on the first production of the Sunbeam Motion Picture Corporation is well under way in New York City . . . The production on its release will make Sunbeam’s first bow in the picture world. . . . When you see this picture you will congratulate yourself on your connection with this company.” 

Glaser viewed the project as tailor-made for Cobb. The title was Somewhere in Georgia, and it was based on a story by Georgia native Grantland Rice, then a New York Tribune columnist. At the helm would be George Ridgwell, an actor-writer who amassed over 70 screen directorial credits between 1914 and 1929. (In the Sunbeam stock solicitation ad, Ridgwell was quoted as promising that the film “will mean standing room only, wherever exhibited, and it will be a MARVEL of completeness and technique.”) The scenario would feature the ballplayer as “Ty Cobb,” a poor but upright bank clerk and part-time ballplayer who competes with a smarmy cashier for the affection of the boss’s daughter. Meanwhile, his ball playing is scrutinized by the Detroit Tigers and he is signed to a professional contract. After returning home to entertain the locals, he is momentarily foiled by some ruffians in the employ of his rival before winning both the climactic game and the girl.

Glaser assuaged Cobb’s fears of screen acting by explaining that shooting a film was entirely unlike touring in a play. There would be no traveling from city to city, no repeating his performance, no gladhanding and posing with well-wishers. Plus, he would walk away with what Cobb biographer Charles C. Alexander described as “at least as much as he got for his theatrical tour in 1911-12.” According to Al Stump, the Cobb biographer who also ghostwrote his autobiography, his Somewhere in Georgia salary far-surpassed $10,000. It was $25,000, plus expenses. 

In October 1916, Cobb was one of several dozen major leaguers who earned extra bucks by playing in a series of exhibition games. After one in New Haven, he headed to New York to star in Somewhere in Georgia. Despite its title, the movie was not filmed somewhere — or anywhere  —in Georgia. Given its status as a novice enterprise, Sunbeam wished to shoot the film as close to its West 42nd Street Manhattan headquarters as possible and in the shortest amount of time. 

The entire six-reel feature was filmed in two weeks and, by all reports, the shoot went smoothly. Alexander noted that the ballplayer “again took his work seriously. Director George Ridgwell commented on how studiously [sic] Cobb was, how he seemed to anticipate instructions. ‘I’ve never had to tell him more than once what I wanted done,’ Ridgwell said. The main problem had to do with Cobb’s love scenes with Elsie MacLeod, playing his love interest. Cobb was quite timid, reported Ridgwell, so much so that it had been necessary to direct those scenes with extreme delicacy.” 

Al Stump noted in his Cobb biography that, during the shoot, Douglas Fairbanks stopped by to say hello. According to Stump, the ballplayer and the actor, who then was cementing his status as a silent screen immortal, became friendly and Fairbanks “suggested that he direct a first-class movie on Cobb’s real life. Nothing ever came of it.” 

MARKETING THE PRODUCT 

Somewhere in Georgia was advertised as Sunbeam’s “initial offering to the Motion Picture Trade” in The Moving Picture World, an industry trade publication. In a puff piece which ran on November 11, 1916, the periodical reported that “Cobb has proved since he started to work on his first picture . . . that he is not only valuable because of his world-wide reputation, but because he is a natural born actor.” In the piece, Ridgwell declared, “I will never forget the first scene that Cobb worked in. He seemed to understand what he was to do the moment we set the camera. Well, I was so stunned that I instinctively yelled `Shoot!’ and started on the picture. Every move that Cobb made reminded me of a seasoned actor. And his facial expressions; it seemed that he could be happy and tragic at the same time.” 

Cobb’s onscreen presence clearly was the film’s selling point, and was the focus of its publicity campaign. The ad copy that promoted Somewhere in Georgia to exhibitors made the film sound like a cross between Field of Dreams and The Natural, circa 1916: 

You know Ty Cobb and you know that everyone, whether a baseball fan or not, will want to see him on the screen. 

The Greatest Star of the nation’s Favorite Sport, featured in the People’s Most Popular Amusement, ‘The Movies,’ with a story by Grantland Rice of the New York Tribune, America’s best known Sporting Writer. 

Can you see what that combination will mean at the box office? 

‘SOMEWHERE IN GEORGIA’ is not merely a vehicle for showing Ty Cobb to advantage. It is a big, vital, interesting story by and for red-blooded human beings; a story of love, ambition and the National Game. 

Without Ty Cobb and Grant Rice it would be a big feature. With them it will be a recordbreaker. Ty Cobb is not only the greatest ball player of all time but an accomplished actor as well. 

Somewhere in Georgia was marketed on a states rights basis, meaning that it did not have a national distributor. Instead, regional distributors purchased licenses from Sunbeam to show the film. The ad copy concluded, “We will release this picture on the open market. No territory has been sold in advance of this announcement, but hundreds of inquiries have been received. We therefore advise quick action.” 

Sadly, no footage from Somewhere in Georgia is known to survive. In fact, more than half of all films from this period are lost. Prints and master materials deteriorated because they were generated on nitrocellulose film stock. In some cases, they were abandoned or destroyed by producers who could not see their future value as commercial entities. Any of these scenarios might explain the fate of the Somewhere in Georgia prints. 

Additionally, very little paper material relating to the film exists. In its June 2009 catalog, Lelands.com, a sports auction house, listed what it described as a “never seen before item that will probably never [be] seen again” — a lot consisting of two Sunbeam Motion Picture Corporation stock certificates, dated 1916 and 1917; a Sunbeam brochure; several letters, including one pertaining to the selling of screening rights to Somewhere in Georgia in New England; and, most significantly, a set of eight double-sided eight-by-ten-inch lobby cards, seven of which pictured Cobb. The entire lot was offered for a $10,000 reserve. 

Given its states-rights distribution status, Somewhere in Georgia had no discernable release pattern; the film played in venues that were scattered across the country, and indications are that it earned the most limited release. In March 1917, the film first was seen in New York City. The New York Tribune cleverly referenced its six-reel running time by reporting that Somewhere in Georgia “is described as ‘a thrilling drama of love and baseball in six innings.’ It is all of that, and as an actor Ty Cobb is a huge success. In fact, he is so good that he shows all the others up.” In June, the film opened in Rochester, New York, and the Rochester Express labeled it a “good melodrama with comedy touches,” adding that “Cobb’s acting is almost as good as his ball playing.”

Inexplicably, no record exists of the film being screened in Cobb’s home state. “I don’t know if it played in Atlanta, but I doubt it,” reported Ron Cobb, a self-described “distant Georgia cousin” of the ballplayer. “I have been through the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution for the years Cobb played pretty carefully, and don’t remember seeing anything about it.” While the ballplayer’s College Widow tour earned saturation coverage in the Augusta Chronicle, there is no record in the paper that Somewhere in Georgia played in one of the city’s movie houses—or, for that matter, that the film even existed. Grantland Rice’s column, titled “The Sportlight,” was regularly appearing in the Chronicle. Around the time of the production and release of Somewhere in Georgia, Rice frequently wrote about Cobb, comparing his prowess to Tris Speaker and Shoeless Joe Jackson and making such observations as “Knowing Cobb as we do, we should say that the only element calculated to crush his ambition and break up his determination would be a pine box about seven feet long with the lid nailed over his remains.” But Rice, too, kept mum regarding Somewhere in Georgia. 

Not all reviewers were as enamored with Somewhere in Georgia as the critics in New York City and Rochester. The film was lambasted in the June 7, 1917, edition of WID’s, a journal that offered critical analysis and touted the box office appeal of new films. In a summary of the review’s content, the anonymous WID’s critic called Somewhere in Georgia a “very ordinary movie” Under the heading of “Direction,” the reviewer noted that the “atmosphere lacked class and overplaying made [the] entire offering seem ordinary.” The cinematography was “generally poor; occasionally acceptable.” The lighting was “not good.” Of Cobb, the critic observed: “As actor, good ball player, but better than [the supporting cast].” 

The WID’s scribe concluded the review by observing: 

If your fans are of the intelligent, discriminating community class I’d say that you cannot afford to play this, despite the fact that it would bring you some money. The production is crude from start to finish, the story is ordinary and there is nothing about it to make it entertaining. Naturally there is some interest in watching Ty Cobb trying to appear unconscious of the camera without succeeding very well. . . Even the boob fan will hardly consider this a good picture but they will overlook many of the shortcomings because of the fact that they all understand that the offering has been adjusted to fit the baseball hero’s acting limitations.

Additionally, one highly respected and influential show business figure positively loathed the film. Ward Morehouse, a Savannah native and the longtime Broadway theater critic and New York Sun columnist, labeled Somewhere in Georgia “simply awful” and “absolutely the worst movie I ever saw.” 

Variety, the most eminent of all motion picture industry trade publications, also reviewed Somewhere in Georgia. This critique, printed on June 8, was more flattering. While predicting that the film would “make a ten-strike with Young America,” the Variety scribe wrote that the “story holds interest to the extent that those familiar with baseball and Cobb’s life . . . will obtain a lot of fun in watching Tyrus enact the role of a photoplay hero. . . . The story doesn’t matter much. . . . It is one of those Frank Merriwell stories, with Ty doing the Merriwell stuff that catches the young folks.” The reviewer concluded by predicting, “Some sections will fall hard for the film while others won’t care much to have it hanging around. But it has a good, wholesome atmosphere and a real, live-blooded, clean-limbed [sic] athlete for a hero.” 

DISAPPOINTING RETURNS 

Apparently, not enough sections fell hard enough for Somewhere in Georgia to earn the film a profit. While the actual box office take has been lost in the annals of film history, the fact is that Somewhere in Georgia was the sole film produced by the Sunbeam Motion Picture Corporation. Sunbeam’s only additional involvement in the motion picture business came in 1921, when the company secured the distribution rights to and re-released Rip Van Winkle, a 1914 film originally produced by Rolfe Photoplays and distributed by the Alco Film Corporation. 

Given the low profile of Somewhere in Georgia within the realm of the history of the silent cinema, plenty of misinformation exists regarding the film. For example, in his Ty Cobb biography, Dan Holmes noted, “It was the first motion picture featuring an actual athlete as the star, and it was the first widely distributed baseball movie.” Don Rhodes, another Cobb chronicler, wrote, “The film is said to be the first movie starring a major sports figure.” Associated Press writer Larry Rosenthal stated that Cobb was “the first professional athlete to star in a commercial motion film.” The declaration that Cobb “became the first ball player to star in a movie” is listed as a factoid on The BaseballPage.com web site. The same claim is found on dozens of other Internet venues—including Cobb’s official web site. In truth, however, Somewhere in Georgia was not widely distributed. Additionally, before its release, a host of big-leaguers — starting with Christy Mathewson, Frank Chance, Home Run Baker, Hal Chase, and Wally Pipp — top-lined one and two-reel films. Right Off the Bat, a five-reeler starring Mike Donlin and featuring John McGraw, was released in September 1915 — before Somewhere in Georgia had gone into production. 

A number of professional ballplayers have had lucrative careers as actors-entertainers-raconteurs. The list begins with Mike Donlin, Rube Marquard, Chuck Connors, Bob Uecker, John Beradino (who played in the majors as Johnny Berardino), and Joe Garagiola. Lou Gehrig acquitted himself nicely in Rawhide (1938), his lone screen appearance. Had he not died so young, he might have enjoyed a second career as a B-Western hero. Babe Ruth starred in the feature films Headin’ Home (1920) and Babe Comes Home (1927) and a short subject, Home Run on the Keys (1936); made a cameo appearance in the Harold Lloyd comedy Speedy (1927); played himself to fine reviews in The Pride of the Yankees; and appeared in a number of instructional films. His larger-than-life, overgrown teddy-bear persona registered well onscreen. If he had not been a ballplayer, he might have made an effective sidekick or foil for any number of screen comedians. 

One cannot picture Ty Cobb clowning with the Stooges, cutting it up with Harold Lloyd, or toting a six-shooter and besting Old West varmints in gun battles. After Somewhere in Georgia, he occasionally appeared onscreen in such documentary and instructional short subjects as The Baseball Revue of 1917, Cradle of Champions (1921), Ty Cobb and Grantland Rice Talk Things Over (1930), and Swing With Bing (1940). In the 1950s, he guested on television’s What’s My Line? and I’ve Got a Secret. Easily his most high-profile screen credit was his surprise cameo, along with Joe DiMaggio, Bing Crosby, and Tin Pan Alley songwriter Harry Ruby, in the first version of the baseball comedy-fantasy Angels in the Outfield (1951). 

Simply put, the Georgia Peach had neither the need nor the desire to emulate Donlin, Marquard, and the others. His appearances in The College Widow and Somewhere in Georgia were his lone forays into the world of stage and screen acting. 

ROB EDELMAN, author of more than ten books, including “The Great Baseball Films: From Right Off the Bat to A League of Their Own” (Carol, 1994) and “Baseball on the Web” (MIS Press, 1998), teaches film history at the University of Albany–SUNY.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Audrey Kupferberg; Ron Cobb; Tim Wiles, Jim Gates, and Freddy Berowski, National Baseball Hall of Fame Museum and Library; Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

SOURCES 

Books

Alexander, Charles C. Ty Cobb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. 

Cobb, Ty, with Al Stump. My Life in Baseball, the True Record. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. 

Edelman, Rob. The Great Baseball Films: From Right Off the Bat to a League of Their Own. New York: Citadel Press, 1994. 

Hanson, Patricia King, ed. The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1911–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 

Holmes, Dan. Ty Cobb: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. 

Laurie, Joe, Jr. Vaudeville: From the Honky Tonks to the Palace. New York: Henry Holt, 1953. 

McCallum, John D. Ty Cobb. New York: Praeger, 1975. 

Rhodes, Don. Ty Cobb: Safe at Home. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2008. 

Stump, Al. Cobb: A Biography. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1994.

Periodicals

Clarkson, James. “Ty Cobb May Demand $50,000, Talks of Three-Year Contract.” Chicago Examiner, 5 January 1912. 

E.A.B. “The Play Last Night.” Augusta Chronicle, 19 November 1911, 11. 

Edelman, Rob. “Baseball, Vaudeville, and Mike Donlin.” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game 2, no. 1 (2008): 44–57. —–—. “The Baseball Film to 1920.” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game 1, no. 1 (2007): 22–35. 

“Mark.” “Somewhere in Georgia.” Variety, 8 June 1917, 22. 

Mathewson, Christy. “Ball Player Must Avoid Diversions.” New York Times, 11 December 1919, 54. 

Rosenthal, Larry. “Life, Myth of the ‘Georgia Peach’ Examined in Play.” Associated Press, 18 March 1989.

Thomas, Ron. “Toronto Man Recalls Ty Cobb as an Actor.” Toronto Daily Star, 19 July 1961. 

“American League Notes.” Sporting Life, 1 July 1911, 13. 

“American League Notes.” Sporting Life, 25 November 1911, 13. 

Atlanta Journal, unheadlined article, 24 November 1911. 

“Avon Theater.” Rochester Express, 5 June 1917. 

“Baseball Players Fined.” New York Times, 9 December 1916, 8. 

“Cobb as Actor.” Sporting Life, 9 September 1911, 24. 

“Cobb Makes Debut in College Widow.” Augusta Chronicle, 6 November 1911, 9. 

“Crude Meller Poorly Played, Featuring Ty Cobb.” WID’s, 7 June 1917, 367. 

“Fans’ Applause Helps.” Los Angeles Examiner, 22 December 1911. 

“First Night on Stage Was Like a Nightmare.” Pittsburgh Leader, 3 December 1911. 

“Governor Woodrow Wilson Spent Yesterday in Home of Boyhood.” Augusta Chronicle, 19 November 1911, 4. 

“He Remembers When the Road Wandered On and On Forever.” New York Herald-Tribune, 10 July 1938. 

“Lyceum Theater.” Cleveland Leader, 9 January 1912. 

“Manhattan’s Ball Dope.” Augusta Chronicle, 18 December 1911, 6. 

Moving Picture World, advertisement, 28 October 1916: 504–5. 

New Incorporations.” New York Times, 23 March 1916, 19. 

Pittsburgh Gazette Times, advertisement, 12 July 1916. 

“Sidelights on Tyrus Cobb.” Baseball Magazine, March 1912, 53. 

“Ty Cobb, Actor and Ball Player, Surrounded By Members of Company.” Atlanta Constitution, 24 November 1911. 

“Ty Cobb An Actor.” Toledo Blade, 28 August 1911. 

“Ty Cobb Gives Views on Ticket Scalping As Well As Acting.” Toledo Times, 7 December 1911. 

“Ty Cobb in ‘The College Widow.’” Augusta Chronicle, 12 November 1911, 3. 

“Ty Cobb in ‘The College Widow.’” Augusta Chronicle, 14 November 1911, 8. 

“Ty Cobb in ‘The College Widow.’” Augusta Chronicle, 16 November 1911, 8. 

“Ty Cobb in ‘The College Widow.’” Augusta Chronicle, 17 November 1911, 9. 

“Ty Cobb, in ‘The College Widow,’ at the Grand Nov. 18.” Augusta Chronicle, 11 November 1911, 8. 

“Ty Cobb Is Going On Stage in New Version of ‘College Widow.’” New Jersey Review, 26 August 1911. 

“Ty Cobb Paying Before Camera.” Moving Picture World, 11 November 1916, 879. 

“Ty Cobb, Poor Actor, Good Ball Player.” New York Times, 13 June 1915, 83. 

“Ty Cobb Scores Hit.” Pittsburgh Leader, 5 December 1911. 

“Ty Cobb Suggests Plan to Give Talent a Chance.” Pittsburgh Leader, 1 December 1911. 

“Ty Cobb Today.” Augusta Chronicle, 18 November 1911, 3. 

“‘Ty’ Cobb Will Be Entertained.” Augusta Chronicle, 11 November 1911, 7. 

“Ty Cobb’s Horse-Sense.” Variety, 6 January 1912. 

“Ty Cobb’s Screen Hit Wins Game, Foiling Villain.” New York Tribune, 8 March 1917. 

“Tyrus Raymond Cobb.” Kalamazoo Telegraph, 9 December 1911. 

“Tyrus Raymond Cobb (At the Atlanta).” Atlanta Constitution, 19 November 1911. 

“When Ty Cobb Comes.” Augusta Chronicle, 13 November 1911, 6.

Internet

Baseballtips.com. http://baseballtips.com/tycobb.html. 

BBC.com. www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/a1118648. 

Internet Broadway Database. www.ibdb.com/index.php. 

Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com. 

Lelands.com. https://www.lelands.com/bid.aspx?lot=331&auctionid=905. 

NCAA.com. www.ncaa.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/032608abj.html. 

The Baseball Page.com. www.thebaseballpage.com/players/cobbty01.php. 

The Official Web Site of Ty Cobb. www.cmgww.com/baseball/cobb/know.html. 

Ty Cobb Museum. www.tycobbmuseum.org.

In general, the evolution of spring training in the South took place in three stages. Spring training in its first and shortest-lived form was a series of exhibition games played by one team that began in a Southern city and worked its way north toward the team’s home city. This Southern jaunt was the norm for major league baseball’s earliest visits to the South in the nineteenth century. 

The second stage of development, coinciding with the turn of the century, was the move toward spending a longer period of time practicing in one location, including exhibition games on site, followed by more games on the way home. At first, these visits involved a couple of weeks of “warm-up” before the exhibition tour, but they soon evolved into longer, more focused training sessions. 

The final stage of spring-training development was the establishment of permanent locations for training, with contracted annual return visits and a schedule of local exhibition games. Spring training in Georgia encompassed the first two of these stages but failed to make the transition to semipermanent training sites, at least at the major-league level. This failure was not due to a lack of vision. Better weather and stronger local promotion—including the willingness to construct facilities at the host city’s expense—proved to be the successful mix that ultimately put Florida ahead of the Peach State. 

Professional baseball’s earliest visits to the South were not what we would consider today to be spring training. The Southern city was simply a starting point for an exhibition tour, not a location for any extended workouts. The team might be in the city a few days as players made their way there, and, once assembled, the club would kick off the exhibition schedule with a game against the local nine. While some exhibition tours passed through the state, Georgia was not a particular focus of these early trips. These tours were rarely if ever self-supporting, typically costing ownership more then they made in gate receipts. But as much as the owners might grumble about expenses, the perceived effectiveness of preseason practice made it essential. Working the team out in warmer weather was the focus of these swings through the South, with transportation and housing costs the price to be paid to get the team ready.[fn]In 1896, Baltimore reportedly spent $2,000 on hotels and railroad trips for the 25 players taking spring training. In 1910, the 16 major-league teams were spending a reported combined total of $150,000 in spring-training expenses; two years later this figure was up to $200,000 (roughly $4.4 million in 2009 dollars).[/fn] Teams did not carry a large number of bench players in these early days and did not generally hold large-scale competitions between rookies and established players for playing time. They played their exhibition games with pretty much the same lineup they would use in the regular season. Not all teams made Southern trips during this period; many would simply work out at home for a few days before the start of the regular season. 

Cap Anson has been widely credited as “inventing” the practice of spring training during his tenure as manager of the Chicago White Stockings. However, it might be better to characterize his influence as popularizing, rather than inventing, the “Southern tour.” Author Charles Fountain points out that Southern exhibition trips began before Anson made his first trip and even before baseball was organized into leagues. (The first such trip was by an amateur team from New York preparing for the 1869 season by playing an exhibition schedule starting off in New Orleans.)[fn]Fountain, Under the March Sun, 10–11.[/fn] Cap Anson was tremendously successful as a manager, winning five pennants between 1880 and 1886. His success in the later part of this period followed spring exhibition tours in the South, and by 1886 Anson was beginning each exhibition season with training in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Between training and touring, Anson appeared to be on to something. Baseball is nothing if not imitative of success; more teams looked South for the training edge they believed Anson had achieved.

Site selection was ever important. Anson most often took his squad to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and so did many other teams.[fn]At its height, Hot Springs would typically host four teams each spring— about as many as the entire state of Georgia did each year. In addition, many veterans would begin their training in Hot Springs before joining their teams in training camp elsewhere.[/fn] The attractiveness of the location was partly due to the amenities available in Hot Springs and, again in imitation, a suspicion that there might be something “in the water” of the resort town. Hot Springs held such a mystique that well into the first decades of the twentieth century veterans might be sent there to “boil out the poisons” before joining the rest of the team at a spring-training camp somewhere else. While Hot Springs was an early and popular spring-training site, New Orleans, Savannah, and Jacksonville were also regular starting points for Southern exhibition tours.

The change from simply beginning each spring with a Southern exhibition tour to a system where a team practiced in one place for a period of time before going North occurred during the last years of the nineteenth century. Fountain credits Ned Hanlon and his Baltimore Orioles for this shift. In 1892, playing for Pittsburg (spelled without the final h at that time), Hanlon suffered a serious tendon injury on opening day—the team had had no spring warm-up. In the spring of 1894, now managing Baltimore, Hanlon took the Orioles to Macon, Georgia, and imposed an eight-week, eight-hour-a-day training regimen. Practice included on-field drills and strategy instruction. This entirely new approach at the major league level was the true beginning of what we think of today as spring training. That season the Orioles won the pennant. Then they won it again. And again: three straight pennants from 1894 to 1896. As before, success bred imitation. John McGraw, the Orioles’ third baseman back in 1894, eagerly took all this in. When in 1902 he became manager of the Giants, he held the same type of intensive training. Fountain writes: “McGraw made spring training a spectacle. The players loved it; the press waxed poetic. All of baseball and no small number of southern towns and cities benefited, as America grew more intimate with spring training and the places that hosted it.”[fn]Fountain, Under the March Sun, 16–17. Wilbert Robinson and Hugh Jennings were also on Hanlon’s squad during this revolution in spring-training tactics.[/fn] More intimate, perhaps, though not necessarily better informed. One sporting magazine reported to its readers that Columbus, Georgia, was “almost on the Mississippi State line.”[fn]Sporting Life, 31 December 1898, 1. The state of Alabama is between Georgia and Mississippi.[/fn] 

Following Hanlon’s successes, teams no longer found it attractive to take spring training in the North nor to make a perfunctory Southern swing of exhibition games. In 1897, as New York contemplated holding practice that year in Lakewood, New Jersey, Sporting Life stated that “the idea of making the New Jersey health resort the training grounds is not a very happy one.”[fn]Sporting Life, 9 January 1897, 3. It’s hard to know to what extent it may be the reporter who is making the argument; the same reporter, after all, would be traveling with the team for spring training.[/fn] Hanlon had shown the way—success during the regular season was now contingent upon an intense series of warm-weather workouts. As a result, he also elevated Macon’s role in spring training as teams sought to replicate his methods, right down to the selection of a training location. 

A spring-training site had to meet several requirements. First, it had to be far enough south to provide warm weather. It also had to have convenient transportation. Thus, ports and cities well served by railroads were in the lead as host cities. Next, the site had to have accommodations for the players. A resort town, such as Thomasville, Georgia,[fn]In the late 19th century, Thomasville became a popular winter getaway for the well-to-do; in 1887, it was described by Harpers Magazine as “the best winter resort on three continents.”[/fn] or a larger urban area, such as Atlanta, was better able to house a team due to the greater availability of hotel rooms. Teams could, however, make alternate arrangements when other conditions were favorable. In 1902, the Boston (AL) players stayed in a YMCA in Augusta.[fn]Stout and Johnson, Red Sox Century, 20.[/fn] Next, obviously, the host city had to have a ball field. Most of the spring-training sites in Georgia were also home to a minor-league team and thus had at least one diamond available. Two Peach State towns that hosted spring-training visits didn’t have minor-league teams, but Athens and Milledgeville were home to colleges (the University of Georgia and the Georgia College and State University, respectively) with collegiate ball fields. As a final consideration, the site had to be convenient for practice games with other squads, either in town or nearby. Again, minor-league cities and college towns could provide a local opponent, and Georgia’s extensive railroad system provided ample travel options for the teams. 

The selection of spring-training sites was also becoming affected by the growing size of spring rosters. Twenty to twenty-five men—a typical number as early as the late nineteenth century—could reasonably be accommodated in most small Southern towns, but larger groups all reporting at once could present a problem. One way to deal with the increasing number of men in camp was to have the “yannigans” (rookies and nonroster players)[fn]The term yannigan, denoting a second-string player, reserve, or rookie was in general use by the late nineteenth century. See, for example, “All Hail Yannigans,” New York World, 4 April 1897, 8. In its time, the term could have the same positive or negative connotations that rookie has today, depending on context.[/fn] report to the spring-training site first, while veterans began at another location, such as the ever-popular Hot Springs. The arrival of the yannigans was the herald of spring for many Georgia cities in the Deadball Era. Some of the yannigans would be cut before the full team assembled on site. This crowding was also somewhat eased by sending pitchers and catchers to Hot Springs to limber up while the remainder of the team assembled in another city, or by having the batteries report earlier than the position players in order to get sufficient work—a practice that persists to the present day. 

Spring training was a very hectic time for the manager. In addition to evaluating talent, training the players, and monitoring injuries, the manager was often responsible for arranging the exhibition schedule, securing housing, and scheduling transportation for the team. Sometimes other distractions, such as contract holdouts or the loss of a player to other duties, added to these responsibilities. In 1896, for example, Hugh Jennings left Baltimore’s camp in Macon (with permission) to coach the University of Georgia team for two weeks, rejoining the Orioles when they came to Athens to play the college squad in an exhibition game.[fn]Jennings also coached the university team to its signature win against the University of Pennsylvania in 1897—the first such visit by a Northern college to face a Southern opponent. Since college baseball seasons ended with the coming of summer, many major leaguers had the opportunity to coach college ball before their own regular season began.[/fn] On top of all of this, the manager was usually a player as well and needed practice time himself. 

For the everyday players, spring training most often meant a combination of temptation and tedium. For men who spent each season playing in the larger cities of the North and Midwest, small Southern towns provided few recreational opportunities off of the diamond—except perhaps for gambling and drinking, something the players could ferret out whatever the size of the city. In 1903, while training in Macon, several Boston (AL) players took advantage of a local racetrack—as well as the hotel bar—and departed camp “for about a week to gamble and drink their way into condition.”[fn]Stout and Johnson, Red Sox Century, 26.[/fn] Ballplayers generally were held in low regard in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and a small town could be very unfriendly to them. Couple this public perception with the fact that most of these men came from cities above the Mason-Dixon line, and tensions often ran high. Fountain relates an incident from the 1890s as an example. Denied a practice site in Jacksonville, perhaps because of the players’ reputation, the Cubs went to Waycross, Georgia, for training. “The townspeople received the northern interlopers coolly and warily, and the players exacerbated the tension with untoward and persistent advances on the young women of Waycross.” Following an incident wherein one player disrupted a tightrope act, the team was “invited to leave Waycross, not, as it turned out, for the assault on the aerialist—circus performers and actors had no more standing than ballplayers, apparently—but because the hotel manager claimed that his wife had been insulted by the ballplayers.”[fn]Fountain, Under the March Sun, 14.[/fn] The team moved on to Savannah to begin its exhibition schedule. 

In these small towns, field conditions could be rough and living conditions even rougher. Team discipline often suffered. “In 1898, after [Jimmy] Ryan had resigned as [Chicago] Colts captain, old Tim [Donahue] led the team in a mutiny at their spring training camp. The Colts were staying at a Podunk hotel in Waycross, Georgia. There were only two bathtubs for 18 men . . . and the cuisine outraged the ballplayers. ‘The murmuring,’ the [Chicago] Tribune reported, ‘rose into a strenuous kick. Tim Donahue said that [first baseman Bill] Everett had barnacles in his stomach from the food. The men filed hungrily out of the dining room and held an indignation meeting.’”[fn]Bill Donahue, “Remembering Tim Donahue,” Elysian Fields Quarterly 14, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 84.[/fn] Adding to their frustration, players weren’t paid during spring training, though they were provided with housing, their travel costs were covered, and they received meals or a daily stipend. In 1919, the lack of pay was just one item in a growing laundry list of disagreements between Boston owner Harry Frazee and American League president Ban Johnson. Frazee in effect wanted to change the standard player contract, which stipulated that players were paid from opening day to the last day of the season. “[Frazee] wanted to pay the players during spring training, a plan the tight-fisted Johnson loathed. [The proposal] failed.”[fn]Stout and Johnson, Red Sox Century, 138.[/fn] Players wouldn’t regularly be paid for spring training until after World War II. 

Weather could be an issue in spring training. While teams came to the South for milder spring weather than they would have experienced in their home cities, March and April in Georgia can be stormy, and complaints about training time lost to rain were common. Teams sometimes changed location when the weather foreclosed any possibility of practice. In 1904, for example, both the Phillies and the Giants left their training grounds in Savannah early, chased away by rainy weather. The Phillies headed home; McGraw took his team to Birmingham, Alabama. In mid-1911, Connie Mack announced plans to take his next spring training in Texas, a decision based in part on the bad weather his team had experienced in Georgia that year. It certainly didn’t hurt that the good folks in San Antonio would build a facility for him, a portent of things to come.[fn]Sporting Life, 3 June 1911, 5. Mack also cited a desire to train his players away from the presence of reporters.[/fn]

Other options were available, however. Teams could usually find an indoor location, such as a local gym, in which to exercise and discuss strategy. At least one team refused to stop baseball practice when the rains arrived, choosing to take their practice game inside. Little known today, indoor baseball was once a very popular sport, using equipment and rules modified to indoor use. Modified, but still dangerous. In 1902, Boston’s George Prentiss lost his grip on the bat during an indoor game in Augusta, knocking out two of a female spectator’s front teeth. “The lady bled profusely, and she and several others present fainted.”[fn]Atlanta Constitution, 5 April 1902, 1.[/fn] Other sports could provide just as intense a workout and be safer for the audience. In Atlanta one year, the Washington Senators played football when the weather created field conditions that precluded baseball practice. 

Weather wasn’t the only outside influence that could affect spring training; sometimes conditions back home caused problems for a team. In 1911, the Washington squad was splitting practice time with the Atlanta team in Ponce de Leon Park. The Senators took the field each morning, and the Crackers followed in the afternoon. On March 17, the Senators’ home ballpark burned, prompting the team to extend its stay in Georgia. The fire destroyed the grandstand and bleachers, going on to damage a nearby hospital; within a few days the team contracted for a modern steel and concrete stadium to be built. Meanwhile, the Senators and Crackers were invited to a cookout in appreciation of the spring-training season just completed. The Atlanta Constitution reported: “Ball Players Are Barbecued.”[fn]Atlanta Constitution, 20 March 1911, 7.[/fn] Perhaps not the best headline to use for a team whose home field was a burned wreck. 

As training in the South became a regular activity in the first decades of the twentieth century, competition increased between Georgia cities to secure a team each spring. Clubs that liked their spring sites would attempt to secure the facilities for the next year even before the present year’s training was completed. Exhibition schedules began to be arranged and published in the winter, rather than simply a month or so before training began. Towns had come to realize the extent to which visiting teams could play into local efforts at business promotion, and thus they sought to attract specific clubs—or any professional nine—before a rival city won them over. Civic boosterism was growing in the South at the same time that the perceived disreputable character of ballplayers was on the wane. City councils had the responsibility to make the field ready for the visitors and the authority to approve the use of local facilities. Sometimes, however, a team might be prevented from getting its desired location. In the winter of 1913, the vice president of the Cleveland club traveled to Macon to secure a spring-training site for 1914. He met with local officials, newsmen, and hotel owners; together they finalized the team’s schedule for the following March. By the time he arrived back in Cleveland, a telegraph was waiting for him: Macon’s city council had voted to award its facilities to Boston (NL) for 1914. Working against Cleveland was the fact that the Boston club was managed by a well-known local—George Tweedy Stallings. 

George Stallings, the son of a Confederate officer, was a prominent man in Georgia.[fn]When George decided to change his principal crop from cotton to corn, peas, and hay, this was big enough news to be reported in the Atlanta Constitution, as was the time he gave up his drawing room in a railcar for President-Elect Taft. George Stallings’ father, William Henry Stallings, entered the war in 1861 as senior first lieutenant with Blodget’s Flying Artillery (later Milledge’s Battery). He later reenlisted as a private in a State Guard infantry unit in Augusta. National Archives, NARA M266.[/fn] Born in Augusta in 1867, Stallings graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1886 and enrolled at Johns Hopkins for further education. Baseball intervened, and George left medical school to begin what would be a successful 41-year career in professional baseball, including 13 years managing in the major leagues.[fn]Stallings managed the Philadelphia Phillies (1897–98), the Detroit Tigers (1901), the New York Highlanders (1909–10), and the Boston Braves (1913–20), the latter stint including riding herd on the 1914 “Miracle” Braves. He managed seven different minor-league teams (some more than once), winning Eastern League championships with the Buffalo Bisons in 1904 and 1906. Connie Mack and George Stallings are reportedly the only two major-league managers to have regularly worn street clothes on the bench.[/fn] From his earliest stint as a manager, with Augusta in 1893, Stallings scheduled spring training in his home state whenever possible. This practice certainly lessened his travel time; most advantageous for him was to hold his spring training in the middle part of the state. Twelve times he brought his teams to the Peach State, including four times to Macon and once each to Milledgeville and Haddock. His 3,600-acre plantation, the Meadows, was located in Haddock, about three dozen rail miles northeast of Macon. Milledgeville was just up the road to the east of Haddock, closer than Macon but with less convenient transportation connections. Assembling his players in the area, Stallings could have the team come to his house for practice or just for a cookout. In 1915, he would bring the Braves up from Macon once a week for what he termed a “frolic.”[fn]Kaese, The Boston Braves, 168.[/fn] In the 1920s, while managing the Detroit club, Ty Cobb borrowed a page from George’s book and had his Tigers take spring training in Augusta, where the Georgia Peach made his home. But even the great Cobb could not trump the convenience of holding spring-training workouts in your own backyard, which is what Stallings did with his 1924 Rochester team. 

Although no Federal League teams would train in the Peach State in 1914, the league did provide some excitement during spring training. Going into their first year as a self-proclaimed major league, the Federals disrupted the National and American Leagues, waging a battle for players and ignoring certain contract provisions that the two older leagues felt protected them from the loss of their players. In late March, the manager of the Pittsburgh Feds, Doc Gessler, arrived in Macon to scout some Boston (NL) players. This was a surreptitious trip—Doc registered under a false name. Gessler phoned Boston players at their hotel and succeeded in enticing Braves pitcher Hub Perdue to come by for a visit.[fn]Perdue himself would be back for spring training in Georgia as a manager, bringing his Louisville Colonels (American Association) to Athens in 1917.[/fn] Whether tipped off by a friendly hotel clerk or by Perdue himself, Boston manager George Stallings got wind of what was going on. Just as his father had been called upon 50 years earlier, it was now Stallings’ turn to fight the Federals. George appeared in Gessler’s room with a deputy sheriff in tow and served papers on Doc, preventing him from his undercover mission.[fn]Labor law in Georgia at this time, written in part to strengthen the sharecropper system, made it illegal to offer a person employment when they were already under contract to someone else.[/fn] Stallings had been prepared for this eventuality, having earlier received a tip that the manager of the Kansas City Federals was coming to Macon to lure away some Boston players. That it was Gessler who showed up and not Kansas City’s Stovall didn’t make a bit of difference to the Georgia native. Stallings had armed himself with an injunction against any tampering by the Federals. Gessler left town that evening and traveled to Augusta in an attempt to contact some of the Brooklyn (NL) players who were in training there. Unfortunately for him, Stallings had already alerted the Augusta authorities, who served an injunction on Gessler upon his arrival. Doc’s visit to the state was ultimately unsuccessful. 

To sum up George Stallings’ 1914 spring-training experiences: he wrested the use of Macon’s facilities away from Cleveland for his own team, fought off a raid by the Federal League, and, in an exhibition game in Macon, was credited with saving the life of Newark’s George Smith. First baseman Smith collapsed on the field “with heart failure,” and Stallings revived him “by using artificial methods to induce circulation and breathing.” [fn]Sporting Life, 28 March 1914, 3. Perhaps that short time at Johns Hopkins paid off.[/fn] Should we be surprised that he led the “Miracle” Braves to the world championship that season?

A change was coming, however, that even George Stallings could not combat. A growing and obvious problem with the current situation would change everything: as roster sizes increased, taking spring training in a city with a single ball field became less practical. Having several fields available in one town was no improvement if they were not close to each other, since the manager could only be in one place at a time. Teams needed multiple fields in a single location. Even beyond the concept of multiple fields, team owners had an increasing interest in developing facilities that could host two or more major-league teams at once. On the other side of the equation, some cities were now considering making major investments in their local facilities in order to attract a team each spring. It is hard to overestimate the extent to which these cities valued the promotional value of seeing their town’s name in national stories filed from training camp. Local expenditures were nothing new, as towns were routinely responsible for the upkeep and condition of the playing field before the arrival of their spring visitors. What was new was the idea of having local governments build facilities in excess of what they would need during their own minor-league regular season. It was on this issue that Georgia just couldn’t (or wouldn’t) compete.

During training in 1911, the Boston (AL) and Cincinnati (NL) teams considered sharing a multifield facility in Georgia for spring training in 1912. Under this concept, the teams would be housed and served meals on site. President Taylor of the Boston club pushed this idea as a potential boost for a town, hoping to entice some municipality into constructing the facility.[fn]In the same vein, in late 1911, Hot Springs took steps to build more fields to attract more teams to the town.[/fn] No town stepped forward, and while both teams trained in Georgia in 1912, they did so on opposite sides of the state. Small towns in Georgia simply could not afford to construct such facilities. Nor was any help available from the major-league teams themselves. Already losing money each year funding spring training, they had no incentive to spend even more by building their own facilities. A city that could find the money to provide multifield facilities would win the contest to host spring training in the future. Georgia came tantalizingly close to making this transition, with a privately financed project that was conceived as a multiteam facility but ended up as something very different.

In January 1915, newspapers reported the potential sale of a plantation in the Brunswick area—a parcel centered on an existing structure called Dover Hall— to a group of baseball men. Ty Cobb, George Stallings, and Boston (NL) team president James Gaffney were said to be examining the site, and early reports indicated that they were considering construction of a spring-training facility that could house “no less than a half-dozen clubs, including two or three big league teams and as many Class A organizations as will train in this county.”[fn]“Dover Hall, Near Brunswick, May Soon Be Converted into Mammoth Training Grounds,” Atlanta Constitution, 15 January 1915.[/fn] Stallings was credited with the idea, something he had started working on two years earlier following a personal visit to Dover Hall. However, when the time came to put money on the line, the purchasers, now including many other team owners and league executives, elected to create a private lodge and hunting preserve on the site.[fn]For more information on this little-known but fascinating episode in Georgia’s baseball history, see Brian McKenna’s excellent article about Dover Hall on the SABR Biography Project Web site.[/fn]

Minor-league teams also traveled to Georgia to train. One of the most frequent early visitors was Buffalo (1906, 1910, and 1911 as Eastern League members, and again in 1912 as members of the International League). This fact should not come as a surprise; George Stallings was Buffalo’s manager for three of those four years. Prior to World War I, most minor-league team appearances in the state were sporadic, and not always in the same town for each visit (see table 2). Between the wars, only a couple of minor-league teams came to Georgia to train. Most minor-league teams that called Georgia home took spring practice on their own fields, sometimes in combination with big-league teams. This relationship benefited both parties: major-league teams had some local competition for their first exhibition games, while the minor-league players could mix with, observe, and learn from the big leaguers. The Atlanta Crackers, however, sometimes traveled to take training, including a two-week trip to Hot Springs in 1910 and stints in other Georgia cities in 1916 and 1917. 

With the approach of World War I and even after America’s entry into that conflict, Georgia continued to be a popular spring destination for major-league teams. Spring training in 1918 featured numerous patriotic displays by the teams, including military drills with marching players, each man carrying a bat on his shoulder in place of a rifle. With the conclusion of the war, however, Georgia saw fewer major-league spring visitors. Three teams arrived in 1919, and two came in 1920. Manager Ty Cobb held spring training for his Tigers in Augusta from 1922 through 1926. No other major-league teams came to the state for training in those years, and none at all arrived in 1927. New York (NL) made a trip to the state in 1928, and Boston (AL) had a “last hurrah” in Savannah in 1932. St. Louis (AL), training in Thomasville in 1953, was the last major league team to hold spring training in Georgia. With the Browns’ departure at the end of the spring season, the sun set on major-league spring training in the state. Minor-league training in Georgia, on the other hand, was about to enter its “‘golden age.”(See table 3.) 

While the traditional spring-training destination cities in Georgia couldn’t afford to construct the multiteam practice facilities needed to continue to attract spring tenants, the federal government certainly could. During World War II, the government built military bases and industrial facilities throughout the state. After the war, many of these sites were no longer needed and were made available for lease. Several were converted to baseball use, including an air base in Waycross, which became “Bravesville” (EDITORS’ NOTE: See Papillon/Young article); a Veterans Administration complex in Thomasville, which housed the Baltimore Orioles’ minor-league teams for 12 years; the Cardinals’ 75-acre training complex in Albany, in use for nine years; and another air base—this one in Douglas—now owned by South Georgia College but leased to the Cincinnati Reds organization in the postwar era. These camps represented the last stage in the evolution of spring training—semipermanent facilities that housed multiple teams—applied at the minor-league level.[fn]A necessary condition for the development of this practice was the growth of the “farm” system tying minor-league teams to major-league “parent” clubs. Prior to World War II, many of the minor-league teams were without any formal major-league affiliation and thus made spring-training plans on their own.[/fn] With barracks and a mess hall already on site, room and board was not an issue at these new camps. The teams added ball fields and did some landscaping, but each site required few other improvements. “Bravesville” could accommodate eight of the parent club’s farm teams on four diamonds; the Orioles, with five diamonds, could accommodate 10 farm teams in Thomasville. The Cardinals were able to handle 12 teams on seven diamonds at their camp, and the Reds could train eight teams in Douglas. Newspaper reports praised each of these operations for bringing an “assembly line” process to player instruction.[fn]Due in part to the rise in public relations as a way to boost attendance for the upcoming season, virtually every hometown newspaper for each of the minorleague teams in training camp ran articles praising the operations. Often these were “canned” reports repeated verbatim in several papers at once.[/fn] This heyday of minor-league camps, however, was not to last.