Quotes from Charles Leerhsen

Each note Cobb wrote contained a rave review of his abilities over a fictitious signature. "Ty Cobb is really tearing up the horsehide in the Tennessee-Alabama League—Jack Smith." Instead of sending off these pieces right away, Ty would drop them in mailboxes at various points along the Steelers' circuit, the better to create the impression of a grassroots movement.

Germany Schaefer, trying to send a subtle hint to umpire Billy Evans that the game ought to be called, appeared at second base wearing a yellow rain slicker,

Deep into the evening, some Tigers gave brief, funny talks and the entire assemblage joined in a rendition of "Michigan, My Michigan.

As the first baseman posed these well-crafted queries, Collins went looking for a policeman to arrest Cobb for "striking him while he was wearing eyeglasses," then considered an especially heinous offense.

Cobb was "jabbering all over the place" and practically hornpiping with glee. "What will the Babe say about this trick by Ty, five in two games?" (The feat has been equaled by several players since but has never been surpassed.)

Besides having baseball and success in common they also had Claire Merritt Hodgson, a Georgia native and a Ziegfeld Follies girl who was Ruth's second wife. In her autobiography, The Babe and I, Mrs. Ruth said she had known Cobb "very well" as a teenager back in Athens, before he married Charlie, and for what it may be worth, Al Stump, in his second book on Cobb, suggests they were young lovers.

At the same time, he studiously avoided becoming a textbook player. He wanted to blend the best of the received wisdom into a refined version of his crazy-seeming "harum scarum" style. He wanted to play a slightly different game than everyone else was playing, to be out of sync with the anticipated rhythms, protocols, and conventions.

Schalk, a catcher for the White Sox for seventeen years, no doubt got more than a few chances to use his favorite line about Cobb: "When Ty started to steal second, I would throw to third.

Of the five Cobb children, Shirley, who ran a bookstore for many years in Palo Alto, was the most similar to her father, which may explain her particularly harsh assessments of him.)

Cobb brought as his guest Tigers third baseman George Moriarity, who during the 1935 World Series as an umpire would distinguish himself by stalking over to the Chicago Cubs dugout and threatening to eject the entire team after some players had made anti-Semitic remarks to Tigers star Hank Greenberg.) The next day Cobb broke his rule about

The umpire ruled that the catcher didn't touch Cobb. He also ruled that Cobb hadn't touched the plate. While the Yankee players were protesting, Cobb sneaked around the bunch and touched the plate.

The entry of a hero on the public scene goes unnoticed," the great A. J. Liebling wrote in The Earl of Louisiana, "but his rentrée always has an eager press.

Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby—who had a much worse reputation than Cobb for being an SOB—once wrote a magazine article called "You've Got to Cheat to Win" in which he contended that cheating occurred in each of 2,259 major league games in which he participated, starting in 1915. (He wasn't even talking about the use of spitballs, which were legal until 1920.) Diving into a pitched ball was perhaps the most common illicit practice;

Navin, who never had children, felt close to Cobb from the day he met him, a nervous, travel-worn C-leaguer who had just lost his father under appalling circumstances. The two would excoriate (and extol) each other over the years as only a father figure and son-substitute could.

The president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, Charles William Eliot, thought that ball-carriers in football ought not search for holes in the line that could lead to gaudy breakaway runs, but should do the modest, gentlemanly thing and plow headfirst into the nearest man-pile. (Eliot also didn't like baseball because he believed curveballs and other deceptive pitches to be unsportsmanlike.)

the veteran catcher Moe Berg, a New Yorker who graduated from Princeton and Columbia Law school and was a frequent houseguest of Cobb's in Augusta, would call him "an intellectual giant").

their genial and generous host, who served the MacDonalds breakfast in bed. When MacDonald took a rare first edition of a Confederate military history down from a shelf in the cabin, Cobb noticed his interest, and insisted that he keep the book. When the three went to a restaurant,

Loomis, the longest-tenured Time, Inc., employee, still worked at the magazine while I was researching this book, and when I asked her about Cobb, with whom she'd also gone on a second date to an old-timers game at Yankee Stadium, she directed me toward a memoir she'd written in which she described him as "smart and gentlemanly." He'd been deeply impressed, she said, with her knowledge of baseball.

Cobb's well-deserved reputation as a bibliophile (he couldn't resist biographies of Napoleon) sometimes resulted in him receiving books instead of trophies or flowers.

sense of spoiled romanticism, a disappointment with the way things turned out. It was supposed to be far more beautiful and romantic and gentle, and I learned pretty early on that it wasn't going to be like that.