Ty Cobb

Tyrus Raymond "Ty" Cobb (December 18, 1886 – July 17, 1961), nicknamed "the Georgia Peach", was an American baseball player generally considered to be the greatest player of the "dead ball era" (1900 – 1920).

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• He had a screw loose. I never knew anyone like him. It was like his brain was miswired so that the least damned thing would set him off.
  • Ernest Hemingway, 1954
  • Response when asked to describe Cobb. The two had been hunting partners in the 1930s.

• Ty was an intellectual giant. He was the most fascinating personality I ever met in baseball. To him, a ball game wasn't a mere athletic contest. It was a knock-'em-down, crush-'em, relenteless war. He was their enemy, and if they got in his way he ran right over them.
  • Moe Berg
  • Interview with John McCallum

• The greatness of Ty Cobb was something that had to be seen, and to see him was to remember him forever.
  • George Sisler

• He was the strangest of all our national sports idols. But not even his disagreeable character could destroy the image of his greatness as a ballplayer. Ty Cobb was the best. That seemed to be all he wanted.
  • Jimmy Cannon

• The greatest ballplayer of all time?...I pick the Detroit man because he is, in my judgement, the most expert man in his profession and is able to respond better than any other ballplayer, to any demand made on him. I pick him because he plays ball with his whole anatomy—his head, his arms, his hands, his legs, his feet...I have never seen a man who had his heart more centered in a sport than Cobb has when he’s playing...I believe Cobb would continue to play ball if he were charged something for the privilege, and if the only spectator were the groundskeeper.
  • Charles Comiskey

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• Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It's no pink tea, and molly coddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy: a survival of the fittest.

• Baseball is something like a war.

• If I had my life to live over, I'd have done things a little different...I'd have had more friends
  • Said in his last few years, a time when he was alienated from his entire family, and most others.

• Sure, I fought I had to fight all my life just to survive. They were all against me. Tried every dirty trick to cut me down, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.

• Ty Cobb is one of the great natural forces of Baseball. He is testament to far you can get simply through will. I don’t think Ty Cobb had tremendous, tremendous natural ability. I don’t think he would be a great athlete today. But his intensity, his drive, was unparalleled. Cobb was pursued by demons from his childhood, from his parentage, from his racial consciousness, and he took out all of his aggressions on the playing fields. Everyone was his enemy. It was easy for Cobb to play the game of Baseball as if it were the game of Life and it was a violent struggle, every day: 154 games a year.
  • John Thorn in Ken Burn's 1994 documentary Baseball

• Every rookie gets a little hazing, but most of them just take it and laugh. Cobb took it the wrong way. He came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little razzing into a life-and-death struggle. He always figured everybody was ganging up on him. He came up from the South and he was still fighting the Civil War. As far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees before he even met us.
  • Sam Crawford