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Simon & Schuster
May 2015
On Sale: May 12, 2015
Featuring: Ty Cobb
352 pages ISBN: 1451645767 EAN: 9781451645767 Kindle: B00LD1S3WC Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
Finally—a fascinating and authoritative biography of perhaps
the most controversial player in baseball history, Ty Cobb. Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player
who ever lived. His lifetime batting average is still the
highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after
twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the
Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records.
But the numbers don’t tell half of Cobb’s tale. The Georgia
Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: “Ty
Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than
Babe Ruth could with a grand slam,” one columnist wrote.
When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player
voted in. But Cobb was also one of the game’s most controversial
characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field,
and was often accused of being overly aggressive. In his
day, even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce
and fiery competitor. Because his philosophy was to “create
a mental hazard for the other man,” he had his enemies, but
he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961,
however, something strange happened: his reputation morphed
into that of a monster—a virulent racist who also hated
children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers. How did this happen? Who is the real Ty Cobb? Setting the
record straight, Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths,
traveled to Georgia and Detroit, and re-traced Cobb’s
journey, from the shy son of a professor and state senator
who was progressive on race for his time, to America’s first
true sports celebrity. In the process, he tells of a life
overflowing with incident and a man who cut his own path
through his times—a man we thought we knew but really didn’t.
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