Hall of famers; Pitchers (Baseball); Pitching (Baseball); Baseball cards.; Baseball in art

When my father was born in 1897, northwest Florida was a vast forest of yellow pine. A person could not wrap his arms completely around the trunk of any of those great trees that had stood in place so long, there was no underbrush. The forest was as clean as a park and one could see for a quarter-mile. By the time my father was playing in the majors, that forest had been devastated: first, by turpentine workers who drained the gum by cutting deep, cup-like wells in the tree’s trunk; then by lumber mills that leveled the woodland. My father took the destruction of that for­est as a personal loss. For the rest of his life he had an abiding reverence for the pine tree and a crusading zeal for conservation and reforestation, an environ­mental consciousness that was years ahead of its time. The depth of his feeling impressed on me what an awesome place that old forest must have been.

The details of family history leading up to my father’s birth are pieced haphazardly in my mind, based on memories of tales I heard when growing up. Recently, a relative in Georgia informed me that research on the family had established the identity of its progenitor in America: one Claude Phillippe de Richebourg, the pastor of a Huguenot church who arrived in Virginia in 1690 and had migrated to Santee, South Carolina, by the time of his death in 1718. The Richbourgs’ connection to the Huguenots, a Protestant sect that was persecuted in 17th-century France, as well as their connection to South Carolina and cattle, had been a part of family lore for as long as I can remember. The economic function of Georgia and the Carolinas in the 18th century was to provide food for slave plantations on the sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean, and South Carolina’s main product was beef.

By the late 19th century, a handful of South Carolina families had drifted down to northwest Florida, the Richbourgs among them. Those cattle clans managed their herds simply by turning them loose in the forest.

The cattle grazed in low places along the river branches and swamps, becoming nearly as wild as deer. Their range extended from Crestview, Florida, to the northwest shore of Choctawatchee Bay, an area about the size of Rhode Island. Every so often, a bunch of cows would be gathered up and herded to a railhead in Florala, Alabama, where they were sold off for a nickel a head. “But it was all profit,” my father would hasten to add.

Those periodic round-ups were called “cow hunts.” They were carried out by men and boys mounted on skinny horses riding in U.S. Army cavalry saddles, the most minimal and cheapest of gear, and using dogs with powerful jaws that would clamp down on a cow’s muzzle and hold it in place. There were celebrated dogs and horses whose names are lost in the fog of time, but one I do remember was Dillard, a horse renowned for his quickness and skill as a cow pony, as well as his longevity—some 18 years in service. For weeks at a time, the cow hunters lived in the forest in pursuit of cattle. To me, as a boy hearing those tales, it all sounded like a huge, glorious camping trip, compounded by the romance and excitement of careering through the wild on horseback. But my Uncle Clint, who had been born into the final days of cow-hunt life, used to shake his head and mutter about the absurdity of riding a horse for fun.

Once my father took sick while out on a hunt. For a couple of days, he could barely sit on his horse. When my grandfather finally noticed his boy’s indisposition, all he said was, “Son, you don’t look so good. You’d better go home.” Going home meant a 20-hour ride through the forest—alone. When my father finally reached his destination, he spent the next two months in bed with some unnamed fever. No one knew what it was, though he nearly died of it. I thought to ask him how old he was at the time: “Twelve,” he replied.

My father told of riding through the forest from cow-hunt encampments to play in ball games. When he was about 16, he went to boarding school in Defuniak Springs, Florida, and played baseball there. He spoke of a teacher, a woman who was in charge of the school’s athletics, who told him he had the ability to play baseball for a living. Volume II of SABR’s Minor League Baseball Stars lists Lance Richbourg as having played in the Dixie League with Dothan, Alabama, as early as 1916. He is listed as having played 48 games for Newport News of the Virginia League in 1918, which must have occurred while he was in the Navy because I have discharge papers dated December 7 of that year. After his discharge, my father enrolled at the University of Florida. A story he liked to tell was of standing on the porch and watching the festivities of his fraternity’s dance through a window because all he had to wear was his navy issue.

In the spring of 1919, my father lettered in baseball and was discovered and signed by the New York Giants. It came about like this: The Giants were working their way north after spring training, playing exhibition games along the way. One was in Gainesville against the University of Florida team, and beforehand the college president addressed the team. “Who knows but someday one of you might wear the colors of the New York Giants,” he said. One story has it that my father, playing third base, charged in on batter Heinie Zimmerman, expecting a bunt. Instead, Zimmerman lashed a line drive that my father miraculously gloved. As dramatic as that anecdote is, it seems he would have needed to perform deeds of more consequence—perhaps lining a couple of his signature triples—to catch the eye of John McGraw. Whatever my father did, the next day he was sitting in the bleachers watching the Giants work out when the legendary manager approached him and said, “Son, did you ever consider a career in professional baseball?” McGraw signed him then and there for $250 per month, which my father took to be all the money in the world.

That summer he went up to New York. The intra-team competition was so ferocious, he told me, that McGraw would have to clear the way so my father could get in a few swings during batting practice. ‘Those old veterans weren’t going to make some kid who might take their job feel welcome to it,’ my father said. He never did get into a game that season, and the next he tested McGraw’s patience by not reporting until his college term was done in May (he eventually earned a B.S. in agriculture in 1922). As a consequence, the Giants farmed him out to Grand Rapids, where he hit .415 in 87 games.

The next year, in 1921, McGraw sent him to the Philadelphia Phillies in a trade for Casey Stengel. Reporters considered it crazy to trade the “fleet-footed Richbourg” for the “clumsy Stengel,” but Casey went on to become a World Series hero for the Giants while my father played only ten games for the Phillies.

In 1923 my father, playing for the Nashville Vols, was enjoying a fantastic season. He and Kiki Cuyler composed two-thirds of what sportswriters were calling the best outfield ever in the Southern Association. It was broken up in midseason, however, when my father, batting .378 at the time, split the large bone in his lower left leg while sliding into third, beating out a triple. The Nashville Tennessean wrote, ‘If somebody had to break his leg, why couldn’t it be Warren G. Harding or the King of Spain?’ Just days earlier my father had been purchased by the Washington Senators, and the injury seriously interrupted the trajectory of his career. While Cuyler moved on to Pittsburgh in 1924, capitalizing on his prime to build a Hall of Fame career, my father reported to the Senators, not fully healed. Washington had Goose Goslin in left field and Sam Rice in center, but right field was up for grabs; nonetheless, my father was unable to beat out the likes of Nemo Leibold, George Fisher, and Carr Smith. The Senators ended up sending him to Milwaukee in a deal for Wid Matthews, and that third outfield slot eventually fell to Earl McNeely, whose famous “pebble hit” won the seventh game of the 1924 World Series.

In 1975, my father recollected his final at-bat with the Senators to Ed Barfield of the Pensacola News Journal: “We were playing Boston in Washington and were tied up 2-2 in the bottom of the ninth. Bucky Harris, our manager, had told us before the last inning that if our leadoff hitter, Muddy Ruel, got on base, then Fred Marberry, our pitcher, would have two swings to bunt him down. If he were to fail after two strikes, then I was to pinch-hit. Well, Ruel got on base, Marberry got two strikes on him trying to bunt, and I came in to pinch-hit. The count got to 3-2, and then I lined one over the third baseman’s head just fair for a triple. We won 3-2. As I was walking up the long ramp from the dugout, Harris came up, slapped me on the back, and said: “Way to hit the ball, kid. Pack your bags, you’re going to Milwaukee.”

That story serves well to invest the narrative of my father’s career with drama and bittersweet irony, but it never really occurred. The game that comes closest took place in Detroit on June 4, only a few days before his release when he pinch-hit and drove home the go-ahead run in the top of the eighth inning. The Tigers, however, scored in their half of the eighth and eventually won the game in extra innings. In the mind of my father—as scrupulous a person as anyone I’ve ever known—that story had become the truth. That he had come to believe it, in my opinion, shows the measure of his pain in failing to hang on with a team that became world champions.

My father had three solid seasons with Milwaukee. In 1926, he had a standout year, leading the American Association in runs, hits, triples, and stolen bases. From 1927 to 1931, he played right field for the Boston Braves, posting his best season in 1928 when he batted .337 and ranked fourth in the National League with 206 hits.

Because my father was a left-handed batter and fast, he often bunted for hits. He practiced throughout the season, spending mornings in Boston trying to place bunts into a cap that his partner, an old pitcher, would move around the infield. Once, playing in Cincinnati, opposed by Hall of Fame pitcher Eppa Rixey, my father laid down a bunt that rolled backward.

In the eighth inning and eventually won the game in extra innings. In the mind of my father—as scrupulous a person as anyone I’ve ever known—that story had become the truth. That he had come to believe it, in my opinion, shows the measure of his pain in failing to hang on with a team that became world champions.

Catcher Bubbles Hargrave charged blindly over the ball. When my father got to first base, he looked back and saw the ball sitting in the center of home plate—reportedly the shortest base hit in the history of baseball. On May 14, 1927, Lance Richbourg made it into baseball’s official record book—as well as Ripley’s Believe It or Not—by playing right field throughout 18 innings of a doubleheader without a single fielding chance, thereby setting the standard for a single day’s idleness. On July 31, 1929, my father entered the record book again when he hit three triples in one game, tying the major league mark. 

I have a newspaper clipping in which Paul Shannon of the Boston Post describes my father snagging a scorching line drive in his bare hand. “By way of a desperate spring, he managed to intercept the sphere though he took it over his head,” Shannon wrote. “The ball landed squarely on the tips of the fingers of his “Meat Hand.”‘ The article goes on to describe my father finishing that game and playing through the second game of the doubleheader, though he was seen to shake his hand after swinging and many of the spectators figured he must have been hit by a foul tip. X-rays after the game showed that his finger had been broken at the top joint. I remember that there was not a single straight finger on either of my father’s hands; apparently, they all had been broken at one time. Another Shannon clipping describes Richbourg as a “brittle type of athlete.” When I asked my father about that remark, he said, “I just took chances those other guys wouldn’t take.” One of those chances came in 1931 when my father ran into the outfield wall while chasing a fly ball. The resulting injuries limited him to 97 games that season, and his .287 batting average was his lowest with the Braves. That December he was traded to the Chicago Cubs. 

One time in Chicago, my father and some teammates were taken to a restaurant, something of a private club from his description. Upon seeing a couple of dark, dapper gents across the room, their host quickly made his way over to their table and introduced them to his ballplayer guests. One of those gentlemen was “Legs” Capone, Al’s brother. “I had to let them know who you were,” their host explained, “otherwise they might bomb my store or something.” After 44 games with the Cubs, my father was sent down to the International League, where he batted .371 in 75 games. “There is no greater gulf than the gulf between the major and the minor leagues,” my father used to say. He was called back to Chicago in September, but not in time to be eligible for the 1932 World Series, when Babe Ruth supposedly made his famous “called shot.”

After the Series, Cincinnati acquired my father, who refused to report when the Reds tried to send him back to the International League with Rochester. Henceforth he was sold to his old team from bittersweet 1923, the Nashville Vols, and in midseason 1935, he was named player-manager. “Richbourg is too much a gentleman to be a successful manager,” wrote one reporter when he was fired at season’s end, but he was soon rehired and continued as player-manager in Nashville through the 1937 season.

In 1938, he received a similar appointment in Richmond, Virginia, where I was born at the end of the season. My birth marked the end of my father’s playing career in organized baseball. After managing one more season in Richmond, he bought a ranch near Ft. Pierce, Florida, merging it with a much larger ranch owned by Alto Adams, a boyhood friend and successful lawyer who was soon appointed to the Florida Supreme Court and later ran unsuccessfully for governor. For a few years, my father managed the 20,000-acre ranch, also managing the Ft. Pierce baseball team in his spare time.

By the mid-1940s, my father was in charge of the Farm Security Program at Escambia Farms, Florida. That program helped returning World War II veterans acquire small farms, with a new house, barn, and mule composing the package to get them going raising cotton, corn, or peanuts. Perched on a little rise behind the Escambia Farms General Store, my father’s office was a small prefab house identical to those on the veterans’ farms, and that place, as well as the drives out dusty farm roads to visit FSP farmers, form some of my earliest memories involve the knowledge my father had gained from his lifelong experience working with cattle, a valuable resource in a community without a large animal veterinarian. Once, a full-grown stallion was brought to our house for my father to castrate, and when my mother asked, “Can you castrate a horse?” he confidently replied, “I can castrate anything.”

In 1948, my father was elected County Superintendent of Education in a landslide victory of 5,281 to 1,226, reflecting both his popularity and, possibly, dissatisfaction with the incumbent. When he took office, the school system faced financial challenges, and my father’s frugality brought it back to financial health within two and a half years. During his 16-year tenure, 17 new schools were constructed, and the operating budget grew from $900,000 to $7,428,000. Upon my father’s retirement in 1964, U.S. Representative Bob Sikes telegrammed, “I can think of no finer tribute to a man in Public Life than to say he gave every fiber of his being to the job.”

My father turned his full attention to the Crestview ranch, which had been homesteaded by his family generations before. I worked with him during the last years of his life, finding the ranch as a break-even proposition but rewarding if raising cattle was one’s passion, as it was for my father. He had a keen knowledge of each of the 200 cows in the herd. When the calves came, for instance, he always knew which calf belonged to which cow, though it took me several weeks. to learn, and even then, I could never match them all. We worked many long hard days together. His stamina and energy seemed youthful, which might have been an effect of his lifelong discipline to hard work. My father claimed to take a teaspoon of turpentine every day in winter to ward off colds, and he never had any serious illness.

When I left the ranch in 1975 to take a teaching job in Vermont, my father decided to cut back the herd. Early in the morning of September 10, he loaded a truck with cattle to send to market. After he got them all aboard, he sat down next to the cattle chute and died. He was 77 years old.

Shortly thereafter, Red Barber, the famous radio voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers, remembered my father in his column in the Tallahassee newspaper:

“I only saw him once and at a distance. It was at a ball game in a small town and in a very small ballpark. It was just an exhibition game in the spring of 1927. The Boston Braves were playing the then-minor league Milwaukee Brewers in Sanford, Florida. This man I saw that one afternoon took my eye every time a fly ball was hit to his area. He was slender, and he moved with a fluid, certain grace. It was a joy to watch him judge where a ball would come down, glide to the spot and with a soft yet sure hand catch the ball. …

“Years later Branch Rickey explained what I had seen and would see many, many times in the big cities of the land—in his phrase, ‘the pleasing skills of the professional.’ And it came back to me in a flash when and where I first became in any way aware of it: 1927, Sanford, watching Lance Richbourg play the outfield.”

Dubbed by one critic as “America’s foremost baseball artist,” LANCE RICHBOURG JR. is an art professor at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, and a member of the Gardner­-Waterman Chapter of SABR. His work is represented by O.K. Harris gallery in New York City. The author wishes to thank Tom Simon and Elaine Segal for their editorial assistance.

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.

The year 1884 marked the Eastern League’s inaugural season, and the circuit had a less than auspicious start. A number of teams folded or bolted, and one club made a shambles of the race. In fact, the Wilmington Quicksteps wrapped up the championship on August 15. Their 51-12 record rendered the season’s remaining six weeks meaningless. The Delaware team remedied this awkward situation three days after clinching the title by jumping to Harry Lucas’ Union Association, which operated that year as a major league.

Wilmington’s dominance proved disastrous at the gate, and the team lost $1,000 while winning the Eastern League championship. The ownership felt that a shift to the Union Association would induce fans to come to see big leaguers play the locals. In addition, the Union Association, which was in some disarray itself and would last only one season, had offered direct financial inducements for the Quicksteps to change leagues. The U.A. promised to pay the Quicksteps’ travel expenses, and besides the customary $65 that was paid to the visiting team Wilmington would, in some cases, split gate receipts 50-50 with the home club.

This arrangement sounded fine to the Quicksteps. Picking up the schedule of the disbanded Philadelphia Keystones, the Quicksteps played 18 games and lost all but two of them. This represented a won-lost percentage of .111, a sharp contrast to their Eastern League winning percentage of .810.

The 2-16 record put them at the bottom of the Union Association, and their .111 percentage also provides the answer to the trivia question of “Which major league team had the worst record in history?” (Not the 1899 Cleveland Spiders with their .130 record, but the 1884 Wilmington Quicksteps.)

The Quicksteps’ pitching fared pretty well in the new league, posting a 3.04 earned-run average. This was only five points above the league average. However, the team’s batting average of .175 dashed any hopes of competing with other U.A. teams. Wilmington pitchers also received little help from their defense.

The Quicksteps’ poor showing in the shaky Union Association would seem to be an indication that the level of play in the Eastern League was pathetic, but this was probably not so. The Quicksteps fielded a solid and stable lineup throughout the Eastern League season, but lost several key players after the transfer to the U.A.

Unlike Newark, which had eight third basemen, and Trenton, which cut its roster severely in midseason, the Wilmington club had carried just eight regulars, three pitchers and a utility man while building up its insurmountable lead over the first three and one-half months of the Eastern League race. The Quicksteps’ roster included Emanuel “Redleg” Snyder, 1b; Charles Bastian, 2b; James Say, 3b; Thomas “Oyster” Burns, ss; Thomas Lynch, Dennis Casey and William McCloskey, of; Tony Cusick, c; Edward “The Only” Nolan and Daniel Casey (Dennis’ brother), pitchers. Burns also did some pitching and Lynch some catching. Late in May the Quicksteps picked up John Munce of the Baltimore Monumentals as an extra outfielder.

At one point Bastian went ten consecutive games without an error, handling 76 chances, an incredible feat in that era before the introduction of outsized gloves. He was considered one of the best second basemen in the country and compiled a .932 fielding average in the Eastern League. For comparison, the best mark in the majors for second basemen that season was .937 by player-manager George Creamer of the Pittsburgh Alleghenys.

It was the end of June before Wilmington signed its third full-time pitcher. He was 17-year-old John Murphy of the disbanded Altoona Unions. (The Baseball Encyclopedia shows the Altoona player as Con Murphy, but this was impossible because the great Con pitched for Trenton from April to August. The Wilmington Morning News noted the Quicksteps’ new pitcher as “John Murphy of Altoona.”) Murphy had posted a 5-6 record for the ill-fated Altoona team, which had a dismal 6-19 record when it dropped out of the Union Association on June 2. With Wilmington Murphy was 0-6 after the Quicksteps switched to the Union Association.

Seeking extra offense, Wilmington picked up catcher-outfielder John Cullen from the disbanded Reading team early in August. He had led Reading in batting with .314. Also acquired was Ike Benners, who was dropped by the Brooklyn American Association team after batting only .201. With the arrival of Cullen and Benners, the Quicksteps released Munce.

When the Quicksteps joined the Union Association, they had their largest roster – 12 players, including all those who had put the team beyond reach in the Eastern League. As a consequence, the U.A. had reason to be optimistic that its newest team would make a good showing. In fact, Wilmington got off to a good start by beating the tough National team of Washington, 4-3, in its first game behind the pitching of Dan Casey.

Two days later, on August 21, the Wilmington team’s hopes came crashing down. Outfielder Dennis Casey and captain-shortstop “Oyster” Burns, known as the “Wilmington Growler,” jumped to the Baltimore Orioles of the American Association for much more money than they were making with the Quicksteps. Both were superior hitters (Casey finished second in the E.L. with a .370 average and Bums was third at .337). Casey was paid $900 a month by the Orioles (only the top players received as much), but managed to hit just .248. Baltimore’s $700-per-month investment in Burns paid higher dividends with a .290 batting average.

Wilmington missed Burns’ power. He had led the Eastern League in home runs with 11 and triples with 15. His home-run total was remarkable in the age of the deadball. The entire Trenton team produced only 14 roundtrippers that season. Burns’ total of 11 was average for the major league homer leaders of the period, but more impressive because of the much lower number of games in which he participated.

On the same day that Dennis Casey and Bums jumped to the American Association, both “The Only” Nolan and his batterymate, Cusick, hopped across the state line to play an exhibition game for the Philadelphia National League team. Wilmington had the day off from the U.A., so it was no great catastrophe. A bit of a problem did arise when Phillie manager Harry Wright claimed after the game that the battery was Philadelphia property. Wright promised that if either player returned to Wilmington he would have him blacklisted. This was contested by the Quicksteps, who claimed Wright had no right to make such a claim. Nolan, unintimidated, returned to Wilmington and went on to pitch the Quicksteps’ only other U.A. victory on September 3, again versus Washington. His Union record of 1-4 was not as impressive as might be expected of a pitcher who struck out 52 and walked seven in 40 innings.

This was not the first time during the season that Nolan had passed up a chance to play for a major league team. In June the same Philadelphia club had offered Cusick and Nolan a package deal of $1,000 a month, but both refused. In July the Baltimore Unions offered Nolan $350 a month to help them, but once again he declined. His motives were later brought to light when an article on him in the Wilmington Morning News reported that “no other player has had a more checkered past.” The story pointed out Nolan had three prerequisites for joining a team: 1) It must be a poor club, 2) He must be paid a large amount of money, and 3) He must be the king of the pitching staff.

That explained a lot, including his unique nickname. Both the Philadelphia and Baltimore offers were impressive, but each team had one or more outstanding pitchers and thus Nolan’s third and most important reason for joining a team would not be met.

With Wilmington his pay was moderate and the quality of play was well above his requirements, but much more important, he was admired. Nolan eventually wound up with a disappointing 23-52 major league record, but he was a man who would be invited to the White House to have a catch with President McKinley. Recognition was vital to him. He may not have been the premier pitcher in 1884 that he was back in 1876-77, but with the Quicksteps he still was “The Great and Only” Nolan, and Harry Wright could not offer enough to induce him to leave the Quicksteps.

Cusick, on the other hand, fell victim to mortal urges when it came to Wright’s offer. The Phillies needed a catcher badly. Cusick was offered $375 a month – more than twice his Quickstep salary – to jump to Philadelphia, and he accepted.

With the acquisition of Cusick, Wright released pitcher Jim McElroy and reserve catcher Gene Vadeboncoeur. Interestingly, McElroy had started the `84 season with the E.L.’s Baltimore Monumentals at a reported salary of $50 a month. With Philadelphia he received $300. To make up for the loss of Casey, Bums and Cusick, Wilmington signed on both of the Philadelphia rejects.

The Quicksteps also tried to pick up the slack by adding Harry Fisher, a shortstop-outfielder from Cleveland, and Henry Myers, who had been released by Trenton. Fisher’s background is a bit confusing because The Baseball Encyclopedia lists a “Fisher” with an unknown first name as playing for the Philadelphia and Wilmington Unions in 1884. The Wilmington papers reported the signing of “Harry Fisher of Cleveland.” The Baseball Encyclopedia shows Harry Fisher played for the Kansas City and Chicago-Pittsburgh Unions. As it turned out, Fisher was hardly a satisfactory replacement for Dennis Casey.

Besides the inadequacy of the three replacements, the Quicksteps experienced pitching problems. Dan Casey left the team on August 25. Although he had the best record (1-1) on his U.A. team, he was disgusted with the deteriorating condition of what had once been the most tightly-run baseball organization in the nation.

Wilmington soon signed Fred Tenney from the Washington Unions and picked up Edward “Jersey” Bakely from the disbanded Keystones in hopes of finding a replacement for Dan Casey. Tenney had posted a 3-1 record with the Boston Unions but was released. Bakely had been the Keystones’ No. 1 pitcher with a 14-25 record. His greatest asset was his endurance, and he wound up third in the U.A. behind one-armed Hugh Daily and Bill Sweeney in both complete games and innings pitched.

Tenney pitched one game for Wilmington, lost (of course), became disgusted with the lack of support and cohesiveness on the team and quit. Bakely stayed around long enough to pitch two games (both losses) and then joined the Kansas City Unions. He wound up leading the U.A. in defeats with 30 as compared to 16 victories.

On September 15 all of the Quicksteps’ problems reached a climax. The Wilmington papers reported that no fans showed up that day for a home game with Kansas City. This was understandable for the 2-15 home club was taking on a team that would finish one step above them with a 16-63 record. Manager Joe Simmons called his players off the field, forfeited the game and the team disbanded.

Lack of fan support was given as the reason for the folding of the Quicksteps, but U.A. rivals had other thoughts. It was claimed that on Wilmington’s first western trip the traveling expenses promised the Quicksteps by Harry Lucas, St. Louis manager and U.A. president, had never been paid. What made this accusation worse was the contention that Lucas bilked Wilmington deliberately in order to freeze the team out of the league. It was said that Lucas been been in touch with the Omaha Base Ball Club, which promised large paying crowds for U.A. games played in the Nebraska city.

Since Kansas City was in town when the Quicksteps disbanded, several of the Wilmington players joined the westerners. Besides Bakely, infielders Bastian and Say were signed by Kansas City. Lynch joined the Philadelphia N.L. team and took the catching job away from former teammate Cusick.

While it is true the Wilmington Unions’ .111 winning percentage is the worst in major league history, this record gives a misleading impression about both the team and the Eastern League which it had dominated. The reason Wilmington was so superior in the E. L. was that it had a stable roster of good players. The lack of any contractual regulations in the Union Association put these poorly paid players in the middle of a vicious players’ market, and the team was broken up as the result of raids by teams willing to pay more money to key players. The move that was designed to recoup the Quicksteps’ losses actually resulted in their destruction

Rutherford “Herman” Hanforth had always loved the taste of raw, sweet onions. It was better than eating a fresh apple, the crunch was the same, but as his teeth sliced through the layers of an onion there was a feeling in his mouth of rings coming away. It reminded him of running the bases after hitting a long ball to the deepest part of the field. Circles of sweet, pungent firmness falling away from his teeth. The grass and loam of the base ball diamond felt the same way under his spiked shoes. He made the comparison at every match he played in over twenty years as a St. Paul Saint.

Over the past month or so, though, every time he smelled the onions carried by the poorest cranks, fans who were usually immigrants by their accents, sitting on the sides of the field, a sour taste would rise in his mouth.  These fans would make a day’s entertainment of the batting practice, ball match, and mingling after, he always liked to hang close to them. They added a rich dimension to the game he loved all his life. They reminded him of his own family and their struggles. “Herman” identified with their movements, first from Norway, Sweden and Germany; then across their adopted country of 45 states. He had loved everything about their clothing, their accents, their foods. Now he would have to drink down a warm beer to get the acid, metallic taste out of his mouth that gagged him.

Last week, he went behind the bleachers, and threw up half way through the match. He knew there was something seriously wrong. He didn’t know what it might be though. He hoped it would go away, and by evening it usually did. It went away to a degree, but not entirely.

Hanforth began to dread the time at the ball field. It was something he had never experienced before, and it dismayed him. The dread made the time surrounded by the rancid onions worse.

The trip to the ball field had started to remind him of the one time, out west, he had seen a hanging, when he was a wild veteran fleeing echoes of the Rebel Yell. He had heard the condemned man had been a hardened criminal. The man had taken horses from a wagon train. He had robbed a small bank, hardly getting enough cash to make the effort worth while. He had killed a cavalry soldier who had been part of a pursuit party. It was for this last offense that he had been condemned to hang. Hanforth thought that such a desperado would continue to thumb his nose at social rules and Christian conviction. But, as the three armed guards pushed him through the crowd of curious onlookers and unchristian thrill seekers, the man kept pushing back against his sentries, forming a human wall between the death walker and the watchers. He cried. He cringed. He pled desperately for clemency. He fell. When he reached the first steps, he went limp and they had to carry him trembling to the platform. As they placed the noose around his neck, the man became hysterical, and could only mouth words. His desperado eyes darted from side to side, looking to be extricated, his soul salvaged. Then in tears, he simply gave up the present and focused on a distant mountain top, he had already died. 

His body simply did not know what his brain had done. That was Kansas, 1871.

Over the years, Hanforth’s mental toughness had become his guards. But now, what had protected him previously ushered him back and forth from the field for each match. They had become his death sentinel.  He could feel himself wrestling emotionally. The ballist felt he knew the battle that the death walker must have struggled with a score and eight years earlier.  

He had gotten through this match, so far, by putting bear grease under his nose so that he wouldn’t be touched by the smell of fertile onions in the heat and humidity. He spent the whole match in pain. Pain had now become a way of life to him. There was a visible loneliness about him, and he wrapped the pain about him like a blanket. Lately, the blanket had begun to grow tight and cruel.

There were a couple times, once in the fourth frame, after legging out a double; then again in the eighth, after running back, and catching a foul for the third out; Hanforth had been unable to stand the pain, couldn’t get his breath, and stood wavering like an oak about to be cut down by the final blow of an ax. He was drunk dizzy.

Outside of the warm beer before the match, he had nothing to drink but tepid water. Even that had the faint taste of onion. He found he could not imagine what he had ever enjoyed about the noxious plant.

Now, in the bottom of the ninth, his last appearance at the bat, Hanforth focused on a spot on the plate just in front of his feet. Catcher Robert Morressey was in his peripheral vision. Hanforth had long ago learned to hate this man. It was far more than hating a Minneapolis Miller player. He had blotted out the fact that they had actually grown up seeing each other across Lexington Avenue in St. Paul and had played together. Outside of Hanforth’s view Morressey flashed his signal to the hurler. The catcher used a variation of line commands he had been taught in the Confederate army. They were simple directional cues.

Instantly, Hanforth looked out to second where the runner, Andre LeJure was peering in. The giant runner blinked twice and then licked the left side of his mouth. Years of playing together had brought a sense of unspoken communication. The striker and the runner were not what you would call friends, but they had spent enough time together to know the mind of the other. They had discovered and exploited their own language in signals. 

The pitch would be inside and chest high. It would be a brush back pitch. If Hanforth swung, he would be jammed and pop up. If he wasted it, the pitch might brush the inside corner and be a called strike. He could try to let the pitch hit him, but not in the chest or shoulder, those two body parts hurt too much already. 

Hanforth’s chest had been tight and sore for almost two days, he had played with pain before. It was a near constant companion after twenty-six years of ball. He even had a name for it, Camille. He held conversations with it, and referenced it when talking to other players. While they thought it was odd, they understood. Each of the veterans had referred to their hurt in some manner. 

To some the pain was simply “It.” Others referenced “The Companion.” One even claimed it as “My Lover.” There was almost a sense of dignity to the discussion, it was a badge of honor. It never really left them, and while the pain may have been dull at times, almost unnoticeable for moments at a time, it would wake them in the night and sit at their side in the day. 

This was different. Camille was warm and familiar. Camille was almost a friend. 

This pain was new, cold, indifferent, and clung onto him like a wet shirt. There was almost a “need” about it, but not an emotional need. That’s why it was cold and indifferent.

 Hanforth was scared of it. He did not wish to talk to it, or about it. There was a sense of cheating on Camille. There was betrayal this pain. This pain grew with every passing hour. It was tight, controlling. His night thoughts focused on it. His daily actions were centered on it, keeping his left side and chest away from anything that could bump against him. 

Hanforth’s team mates had already made a few cracks about “the old man being tenderized,” and “Hanforth’s last season.”

Morressey had chided him his previous at bat. “Ya looked like a plowhorse out there, tryin’ ta dig a furrow to second. I coulda cut ya down by ten feet, ’cept I almost felt a pity for ya.” This insult from the adversary Hanforth swore at regularly. The two had gone from competitors, to adversaries, to enemies, to opposite sides of a stereoview photo card. Two halves molded to the point where each had minute differences, but viewed side by side, they would appear as one fully developed, complex and whole. 

Hanforth, without taking his gaze off the pitcher, nor moving a muscle, replied; “If you’d a tried, I woulda kept plowin’ round the bags and sheered ya’ plum in half as a two share blade would weedy soil. You’d a been turned upside down, an’ inside out.”

Another in a long series of fights was being instigated. Both men knew it. There was at least one fight with Morressey every match. There had been no brush ups yet in this match.

Hanforth didn’t want Morressey’s pity. He didn’t want the fight to stop. The two men hated one another with childish dedication. It wasn’t just that they played for rival teams, there was personal history. Hanforth lost his wife to be to the better looking, wealthier catcher. 

In turn, Morressey had lost money when Hanforth had bought out the catcher’s share of the Millers team. It didn’t matter that he had bought into a rival team. He did it through a front man, and he had been able to watch Morressey’s agony without the catcher ever knowing who had bested him, financially. In Morressey’s eyes, on a balance scale, money outweighed love. In Hanforth’s eyes, love trumped everything else.

Hanforth played for the love of it. Morressey played for the cheers, because it meant a large gate. Hanforth lived to find love. Morressey lived to find a mark he could take advantage of. Hanforth used money to counter anything that would obstruct him from finding love. Morressey spent his whole life creating what he loved—wealth. 

“Strike one!”

Hanforth hadn’t even seen the ball leave the pitcher’s hand because of the pain. But he heard the deep rumbling laugh that came from behind him. The cranks watching the match had started to make light of him. His own personal demon was calling his name.

“Ya like lookin’ at first pitches, but ya never seem ta’ see ‘em delivered, just like the one I gave your wife. Ya’ see ‘em only as they go past.” Morressey tensed for a blow deflected off his hat. None came. Morressey looked up at the batter for the first time. He got great pleasure from the fact that this man seemed old. It bothered him for a second, too. For the first time, he heard the labored breathing. He took satisfaction from the fact, but it also made him reflect back to his childhood for an instant. That labored breathing used to be his, and Hanforth was his protector from bullies trying to take…what, something, anything they wanted from “Baby Bobbie Morressey.” The catcher suddenly realized that for all the insults, dust-ups, down and dirty sucker punch fights they had over the years, Hanforth had never stooped to calling him that, out loud, or under his breath. Why had he never thought of that before? Morressey snuck a look at the batter’s face in front of him and saw him, for an instant, in a way he hadn’t seen him for decades.

The blow never came. In that split second glance Morressey was also shaken—just a bit—because he also only seemed to catch a glance of a shadow. Hanforth seemed hollow for an instant. Morressey focused anew, and the shadow appeared solid again.

 Hanforth seemed to wobble momentarily. Then he steadied himself and looked out to the pitcher, then his runner. Morressey called for low and outside, a slow pitch that Hanforth would find irresistible. 

Hanforth looked out to second. Right thumb jammed into the pants pocket of the uniform. 

Hanforth felt momentarily helpless. The pain he would feel if he turned on it, but it would be a beautiful pitch, in his wheelhouse. A pitch he could drive a mile. Or he could take it and hope that the pitcher’s precision would be just off the mark. A precious ball, just outside. Hanforth had never tended to be a gambler. Everything he did was by design, to attain an objective. He knew there was no such thing as a sure bet. Trusting a pitcher, either way was never a sure bet, so he focused on Lucus Grider’s face. 

The pitcher’s nickname was “The Grinder” because he was so good at grinding off the edges of the strike zone. Umpires talked about how every call was an emotional decision. No matter how consistently an umpire might try to call a game, there would be a debate within the crew later about the issue that what looked like “painting the edges of the zone” behind the plate, looked foul from first or third base. 

Hanforth had heard of these debates all too often. He decided that he would swing, at whatever cost.

“Strike two!”

“Your swing. Looks like ya got lessons from a newborn, there, loverman.” Morressey stopped short because he could hear the rattled breathing and when he looked up, the batsman’s face was white, there was sweat coming off him. His hands trembled. Morressey caught himself thinking his enemy looked like a drunk, trying to hold onto a bar rail for support. In this case, the rail was a bat unattached from any support, and suddenly without the power to slice the air sword-like or protect the holder from a final fate.

“You ok, there, Herman,” barked the umpire.

No answer.

“Boy’o! You need a replacement?” The umpire barked again, but this time there was some real concern in his voice.

Still no answer, but Hanforth managed to wag his head with some vigor. 

Morressey growled out, “Hold yer mouth, ump, this’un’s held his own with the best, an’ thas’ me. I ’spect he’s just settin’ us all up for his big attempt to be the winnin’ hero, an I don’t plan to have anyone spoil that joy, ’ceptin’ me!” He pounded his fist into his glove so that it sounded like a base drum. Somewhere, deep inside, Morressey wished that he had never split from his childhood friend over “Mr. Lincoln’s War.”

It was stupid. Somehow, two competitive spirits turned ugly and defined the rest of their two lives. It bound them together by forcing them onto opposite sides of every event. Fate chose an event at Fort Snelling six years before Herman was born that, in a myriad of ways defined life for both Hanforth and Morressey. Hanforth’s father was an abolitionist preacher. Morressey’s father, Winston, was an army surgeon who knew slave holder Doctor John Emerson. Winston Morressey believed Emerson to be a good, fair and just man. He was a man simply seeking to maintain control of his property. 

Even in a free Minnesota, there was a legal question about what Dred Scott was: Property, or a Free Man with a soul.

Each boy was a benefactor of his father’s philosophy. Emerson was often asked to see veterans living away from Fort Snelling, Morressey and his father would accompany the surgeon to the clinic/home of a doctor who lived across the street from the Hanforth home. Young Morressey spent afternoons there, playing with neighborhood boys, Hanforth among them. Herman sometimes went to the fort and played base ball with Morressey and the men. As time passed, the street became a barrier, then a wall between the two boys. In early 1864 each stole away and rode the same train, unknown to one another, to opposing camps. Morressey fought for the rebel cause in Missouri. Hanforth took up arms in Kentucky for “Father Abraham”. Both left as boys with adventure-lust in their eyes, both returned as angry men, much older than their 16 years would allow the world to see.

After Lincoln’s death, Morressey returned to St. Paul, wore bitterness like a shield and played Base Ball at every chance, charging every base with a Rebel yell that either got him booted, fined, or both. He was so antagonistic about it, that long after fining players went by the way, Morressey still generated fines every match. He would show his disdain by throwing coins at either the umpire or manager. Occasionally, other players would imitate Morressey’s coin tossing to irritate him, but this only served to fuel his passion.

Hanforth simply came home after following the length of Lincoln’s funeral train from Washington to New York, and then west to Illinois. It was as if he were searching for the sign that everything was as it had been. To this day in 1899, Hanforth sought signs. Off the field, he saw signs where none existed. But on the field, he was uncanny about catching movements, repetitive looks, anything that might be a tip-off to a pitcher’s next pitch or a runner’s intention to go. Some catchers said Hanforth had eyes in the back of his head because he always seemed to know what would be thrown next. But not Morressey.

This time Hanforth didn’t make the effort to see the sign off the catcher, he just stared out to second. There LeJure, with a mix of concern and anger in his eyes threw out the same sign as for the second pitch. Hanforth, gazed at his baseman for a very long second and then stood very tall and straight in the box. He smiled at the runner. LeJure found himself thinking, “he looks so small in there,” and then shook it off. 

He had seen that smile, mixed with that tall comportment from this batter before. It was a totally unconscious signal between the two that LeJure had best be ready to run. Run like shot from a high powered weapon. Run like there was no tomorrow. Run for the cheers of the fans, his mates, for the tie score. Run to get out of the way, because a lightning bolt was going to be trying to charge up his leg.

Run as if unchained by gravity.

The pitcher went into his wind-up. Hanforth was tracking the movement of every muscle of the pitch, by the time “The Grinder” had reached his release point, fifteen years had slid off, Camille, and the new pain, were lost for the instant. Hanforth knew where the pitch would cross the plate, and he could tear the cow hide off of it. 

Ball met sword. The missile launched without devastating speed, but with an arc that would carry. The pain came back, stronger. Hanforth could only stand and watch as the ball became light itself, traveling far enough to drive in the tying run, before landing just inches foul.

Panting now, and bent over in pain, Hanforth understood that Morressey would call the same pitch again. The pitcher wouldn’t want to put it over in the same place. He wouldn’t want do the same thing. Hanforth knew what was Morressey had in mind. Seeing the intensity in Morressey’s deep set eyes, the Grinder was hypnotized. He was all but compelled to do Morressey’s bidding. 

All of a sudden there was a hand on his shoulder, the field captain was standing over Hanforth’s bent frame. “Boy, you need to leave now. Go sit it out.”

Almost crying, Hanforth struggled and whispered, “This is mine. It’s what I have, I’m gonna’ give it.”

Morressey stood and defiantly stuck a finger in the Saint’s field captain’s chest, “He’s a big boy, it’s his decision. I want him to do this. Him and me got history. This ain’t between you and him, this is between him and me, you can’t fine me, I ain’t on your roster, but I’ll beat ya’ ta’ death if ya’ take ’im out.”

Hanforth, without waiting for the signal, stood so straight and tall that he once again looked like the oak tree people had compared him to when he first came up. He smiled a triumphant smile at LeJure.

LeJure took four steps of the bag. He took another two steps and roared out so that the pitcher and the crowd had to hear, “My man! I’m comin’ home, an’ there ain’t one damn thing you’ll do about it, ’cept wish ta hell you never delivered that pitch.” With that, he pulled a dollar, a gold eagle, out of his pocket and threw it in the direction of the umpire and proclaimed, “here’s you bleedin’ fine! Buy four beer on me tonight! But mark my words well, sir—I am coming home on this pitch!” This time, it had Morressey’s attention. 

Sudden silence. The sun bore down on the scene creating waves of wet heat that radiated off the ground, bounced off the stationery men and created motion where there was none, yet.

LeJure dug in with his left foot, muscle sinew coiling to thrust away on contact.

Morressey cooled into a slab of oven-forged iron, ready for all blows.

Hanforth, for a second time, was lost in the moment. Everything became clear, calm, and very large. Camille was next to him, the new invader was nowhere to be felt.

The broken lace on the ball had created a whistle that the base tenders, and runner, could hear.

History repeated itself. “The Grinder” moved with the same motions. The release point was exactly the same. The path of the ball split the air in the same way. To Hanforth’s eye the ball was bigger than big, slower than slow. He could track the broken lace as the ball spun toward him. Half a generation spent swinging at pitches was stored memory in the muscles of his legs, torso, shoulders and arms. Anyone under twenty years of age had not yet been conceived when Hanforth first drove a base ball far over the fielder’s heads and he had tallied his first ace.

Then there was this. No ball had seemed larger. No ball had seemed slower. The ball was under a wizard’s spell of time, talent, practice and destiny. Even the ball knew what was about to happen, for as the hand polished ash bat cut time and space, that broken lace seemed to give an eagle’s screech as it began a head first dive toward a far distant prey. 

The shudder went up Hanforth’s arms. Ran across his shoulders, down his spine where it finally met the cold, indifferent intruder between his shoulder blades. By then it was far too late. The ball flashed up, out and away. The bat dropped from Hanforth’s hands, suddenly cold and cramped. 

LeJure let forth an exhortation as he was half way past third, “Move, move, for God’s sake move!”

Morressey never moved, just mouthed an expletive. 

Hanforth, already almost drained of energy, began plodding, pleading his legs to move faster. His heart felt like there was a hot lead rod pushing in on it.

LeJure completed his run, touching the plate with his hand and he intentionally speared the catcher. He yelled above the roar of the crowd, “Safe! Tie score! Safe! Come home!” At that, his tone changed as he watched the runner flailing toward second base. The look on Hanforth’s face was beyond agony, it was moving in the direction of rigor-mortis. Still his arms kept pumping, as if by their own volition. His fingers seemed to stretch out claw like. Still his legs thrashed, one in front of the other, as if by habit. His head was down, staring straight into the ground. 

It was as if the ball knew it had an extra mission to accomplish at the end of this war of wills. The ball seemed to hang, going deeper, just out of reach of the fielders converging on it. 

One sports writer later fell away from the straightforward prose of the day and wrote, “This ball, this damaged, beleaguered spherical orb that had no reason to do any man a favor, seemed to take pity on old Hanforth. For the pure joy of exacting revenge on those who had used it so badly over the course of nine frames, and for the complete sympathy upon he who would end the game; seemed to play a boy’s game of tag with the fielders. That spirit infused cowhide was staying up, and away, and just beyond the grasping, wishing hands of those who would put an end to old Hanforth before he would achieve his final salvation.”

Whatever the truth was, the ball seemed to hang as it went deeper and deeper, finally dropping as Hanforth was half way to third. The runner had found some inner strength, and picked up speed. Maybe that is what really occurred, maybe not.

The fielder hurled the ball with a devil’s fury that the ball had to give in to. It found the hands of the relay man as Hanforth came off third. Turning, giving a mighty yell, “Coming Home!” the relay man launched the ball. 

Morressey covered the plate, still looking dazed, one hand covering his left eye, there wasn’t a visible speck to be seen. He was almost actually sitting on the round dish. He spit out two teeth that had broken as LeJure speared him, There was blood coming out his mouth. 

And still Hanforth came.

The ball was on target.

Hanforth stumbled about eight feet away from where the plate should have been. His face transformed into a cruel puzzle, and Morressey took a moment to savor the chilling truth. Hanforth could not find the plate. Morressey cleared his head sufficiently enough to form the words silently “I’m sitting on it, it’s mine!”

Hanforth seemed to dive. Some would later claim he had merely bobbled on weak legs as he continued the stumble toward the invisible plate. Morressey continued to sit semi-dazed on the plate, the ball bounced once in front of him and to the runner’s side. With a crazed flailing Hanforth managed to get two fingers on the ball and brush it off course. 

Morressey was forced to react, leaving a piece of the plate exposed. Hanforth fell, and inertia alone carried him forward toward the final stopping point. 

Morressey screamed “No, no you don’t! Damn it, I won’t allow it!”

LeJure pounced and blocked the vision of the umpire for the briefest of moments, but long enough for him to get one hand on Morressey and tip him just away. “He’s safe, ump, he touched!” 

But, there, laying face down with one arm and hand extended in a disjointed way, as if they had left Hanforth’s body despite the best efforts of the ball, LeJure, and the runner—a two-inch gap spanned like an ocean between the plate and extended fingers.

By then, Morressey had recovered the ball. The umpire had regained perfect vision of the scene. LeJure stood between the catcher and the umpire, suddenly thrust in the role of Protestant preacher arguing for a final salvation. He implored to God and invoked country. He looked deep into Morressey’s eyes and told him he owed Hanforth this one, it would make up for the wrongs of the past. He pled, and a tear even began to form. He did something he had never done to another ballist before, he apologized for his actions.

Morressey looked at the ball he now held in his hand. He looked at the prone, motionless form covered in sweat and dirt, little cuts oozing from where he had fallen. He looked at the crowd that had gone from frenzied to funeral quiet. Morressey looked at LeJure.

“Not doin’ this for you, nor anything you said. Doin’ it for the glory o’ the game!”

He dropped the ball about six inches away from the plate, grabbed hold of Hanforth’s wet hand and pulled, just a bit. He dropped the hand on the edge of the perfectly round, mostly white iron dish, stood, turned, faced the crowd. “Damned if I didn’t try! My enemy is safe at home.” 

He walked back to the rest of his team, stopping to raise his head in one last, long “Rebel Yell” and never looked back.

A Dakota Indian watching the match turned to his companion, “It is the death chant.”

A visiting Chicagoan told his traveling companion, “There’s a crazy rumor that ‘Old Roman’ Comiskey wants the Saints in Chicago. Think it’ll happen?”

DOUG ERNST grew up in West Central Minnesota on a farm where he and his grandfather listened to Halsey Hall call Twins games on the radio evenings and weekends. As a history teacher, Doug often used baseball as a timeline to discuss the social history of the United States. Now, as a historic fiction writer and historic interpreter, Doug uses his experiences playing Vintage Base Ball as a way of helping him better understand the times he writes about, and interprets.