page_title: Ty Cobb
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Ty Cobb / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Tigers great Ty Cobb slides into St. Louis Browns catcher Paul Krichell in 1912
context_page_description: Tyrus Raymond Cobb, nicknamed The Georgia Peach, was an American Major League Baseball outfielder. He was born in rural Narrows, Georgia. Cobb spent 22 seasons with the Detroit Tigers, the last six as the team's player-manager, and finished his career with the Philadelphia Athletics. In 1936 Cobb received the most votes of any player on the inaugural Baseball Hall of Fame ballot, receiving 222 out of a possible 226 votes; no other player received a higher percentage of votes until Tom Seaver in 1992. In 1999, the Sporting News ranked Ty Cobb third on their list of "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players".
  Cobb is widely credited with setting 90 MLB records during his career. His combined total of 4,065 runs scored and runs batted in is still the highest ever produced by any major league player. He still holds several records as of the end of the 2019 season, including the highest career batting average and most career batting titles with 11. He retained many other records for almost a half century or more, including most career hits until 1985, most career runs until 2001, most career games played and at bats until 1974, and the modern record for most career stolen bases until 1977.
context_section_description: The historian Steven Elliott Tripp has explored the public's reaction to Cobb as a pioneer sports celebrity and "a player fans loved to hate". Tripp writes that Cobb was both loved and hated as a representative of a particular kind of masculinity on the field, inviting male spectators to participate in the contest through taunts directed at opposing players. Cobb's own sense of manhood, according to Tripp, was a product of his Southern upbringing that prized individualism, excitement, and family honor.
  Cobb has been judged by some historians and journalists as the best player of the dead-ball era, and is generally seen as one of the greatest players of all time.
  Some historians, including Wesley Fricks, Dan Holmes, and Charles Leerhsen have defended Cobb against unfair portrayals of him in popular culture since his death. A noted case is the book written by sportswriter Al Stump in the months after Cobb died in 1961. Stump was later discredited when it became known that he had stolen items belonging to Cobb and also betrayed the access Cobb gave him in his final months. As a result of the movie Cobb which starred Tommy Lee Jones, there are many myths surrounding Cobb's life, including one that he sharpened his spikes to inflict wounds to opposing players.
  Writing in The Journal of American Culture, Hunter M. Hampton says that Leerhsen "succeeds in debunking the myth of Cobb that Stump created, but he spawned a new myth by conflating Stump's shortcomings to depict Cobb as an egalitarian".
caption: Cobb sliding spikes high into an opposing catcher
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