Post-Professional Career

Cobb retired a very rich and successful, but very lonely man. He spent his retirement pursuing his off-season activities of hunting, golfing and fishing, full-time. He also traveled extensively, both with and without his family. His other pastime was trading stocks and bonds, increasing his immense personal wealth.

In the winter of 1930/31, Cobb moved into a Spanish ranch estate on Spencer Lane in the millionaire's community of Atherton outside San Francisco. At that same time, his wife Charlie filed the first of several divorce suits.

Cobb had never had an easy time being a father and husband. His children had found him to be demanding, yet also capable of kindness and extreme warmth. He had expected his boys to be exceptional athletes, especially baseball players. Ty, Jr. flunked out of Princeton and would have rather played tennis than baseball, and in general was a disappointment to his father. Despite his shortcomings as a father, Cobb had only wanted his children to work hard and succeed, though it seems that it was hard for him to accept that they would succeed in anything except baseball. Charlie finally divorced Cobb in 1947, after 39 years of marriage, the last few of which she lived in nearby Menlo Park.

A tremendous thrill came in February, 1936, when the first Hall of Fame election results were announced. Cobb had been named on 222 of 226 ballots, outdistancing Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson, the only others to earn the necessary 75% of votes to be elected in that first year. His 98.2 percentage stood as the record until Tom Seaver received 98.8% of the vote in 1992 (Nolan Ryan also surpassed Cobb, being named on 98.79% of the ballots in 1999). Those incredible results show that although many people disliked him personally, they respected the way he played and what he accomplished.

There was little else for Cobb to be happy about, now a bachelor in the twilight of his life. He drank and smoked heavily, and spent a great deal of time complaining about the collapse of baseball since the arrival of Ruth. Cobb was known to help out young players. He was instrumental in helping Joe DiMaggio negotiate his rookie contract with the New York Yankees, but ended his friendship with Ted Williams when the latter suggested to him that Rogers Hornsby was a greater hitter than Cobb.

At 62, Cobb remarried. The bride was 40-year-old Frances Cass. This marriage also failed, and she later filed for divorce. She felt that he was simply too difficult to get along with when he was drunk. However, Cobb counter filed and won the suit.

When his sons died young, Cobb was alone, with few friends left. He therefore began to be generous with his wealth, donating $100,000 in his parents' name for his hometown of Royston to build a modern 24 bed hospital now called the Cobb Memorial Hospital. He also established the Cobb Educational Fund, which awarded scholarships to needy Georgia students bound for college, by endowing it with a $100,000 donation in 1953.

Cobb knew that another way he could share his wealth was by having biographies written that would set the record straight and teach young players how to play. John McCallum spent some time with Cobb to write a combination how-to and biography. He, like everyone else, found Cobb difficult at best, and impossible at worst. McCallum's book came out in 1956 and was filled with half-truths and misinformation that McCallum had never checked out.

After McCallum left, Cobb was again alone and had a longing to return to Georgia. It was on a hunting trip near his Lake Tahoe home that Cobb's long-range plans were going to be cut short, as he collapsed in pain and was diagnosed with prostate cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and Bright's disease, a degenerative kidney disorder. He returned to his Lake Tahoe lodge with painkillers and bourbon to try to ease his constant pain. He did not trust his initial diagnosis, however, so he went to Georgia to seek advice from doctors he knew, and they found his prostate to be cancerous. They removed it at Emory Hospital, but that did little to help Cobb. From this point until the end of his life, Cobb criss-crossed the country, going from his lodge in Tahoe to the hospital in Georgia.

Al Stump, one of the most celebrated sports writers in the country at the time, was asked by Doubleday to ghostwrite Cobb's autobiography. Like John McCallum, Stump found Cobb rather difficult to work with most of the time and totally impossible when drunk. Stump's time with Cobb was "interesting," but not necessarily in a good sense. Despite the troubles, Stump stuck it out mostly because he feared Cobb's reaction if he tried to leave. From the time the two spent together we now have two books and a movie, each of which offers a slightly different point of view of Cobb's life.

A powerful moment in Stump's experience was the visit to the Cobb family mausoleum in December 1960. Cobb had used the mausoleum as an attempt to reunite his family members in death, disinterring some of them to do so. It was here that Cobb told Stump about the murder of his father, and pointed the finger at his mother. He had never spoken much about the incident, and most people at the time probably didn't even know that W.H. had been shot.

Cobb also spent much of his last few years making visits to places important to him, like the Hall of Fame. He traveled to Cooperstown in June 1960, and lingered after-hours in the Hall, gazing at the plaques on the wall, including his own, with tears in his eyes.

By the spring of 1961, Cobb was spending most of his time at Emory Hospital for cobalt treatments to slow the spread of his cancer, which had now moved into his spine and skull. He did feel good enough to make it to spring training of the new LA Angels in 1961, and then to his last ball game on their opening day, 1961.

In his last days Cobb spent some time with the old movie comedian Joe E. Brown, talking about the choices Cobb had made in his life. He told Brown that he felt that he had made mistakes, and that he would do things differently if he could. He had played hard and lived hard all his life, and had no friends to show for it at the end, and he regretted it. Publicly, however, Cobb claimed not to have any regrets: "I've been lucky. I have no right to be regretful of what I did" (Newsweek, July 31, 1961, 54). His last year or so must have been quite trying for him, old, alone, and sick.

He checked into Emory Hospital for the last time in June 1961, bringing with him a paper bag with a million or so dollars in securities and his Luger pistol. This time his first wife, Charlie, his son Jimmy and other family members came to be with him for his final days. His final day came a month later, July 17, 1961.

His funeral was perhaps the saddest event associated with Cobb. From all of baseball, the sport that he had dominated for over 20 years, baseball's only representatives were three old players, Ray Schalk, Mickey Cochrane, Nap Rucker, along with Sid Keener from the Hall of Fame. Also there were his first wife, Charlie, his two daughters, his surviving son, Jimmy, his two sons-in-law, his daughter-in-law, Mary Dunn Cobb, and her two children. He had outlived many of his contemporaries, had alienated most of the others, and a lot of them were glad that he was finally dead.

In his will, Cobb left a quarter of his estate to the Cobb Educational Fund, and the rest of his reputed $11 million he distributed among his children and grandchildren. Cobb is interred in the Royston, Georgia town cemetery.

The Stump autobiography came out a few months later to take advantage of the publicity surrounding his death, and sold well for the four years that it was in print. Despite Cobb's unpleasantness, the book (Cobb: A Biography) painted Ty in a sympathetic light. Thirty years later, however, Stump extensively revised the book, including his own experience with Cobb and capturing the man who was so disliked by so many of his contemporaries. In 1994 the writing of the book was used as the basis for a film starring Tommy Lee Jones as Cobb.

Efforts to create a Ty Cobb Memorial in Royston failed, primarily because most of the artifacts from his life were in Cooperstown, and the Georgia town was too remote to make a memorial worthwhile. The building erected is now Royston City Hall.

However, on July 17, 1998, on the 37th anniversary of his death, the Ty Cobb Museum opened its doors in Royston. The time had become right to honor the man in his own hometown.

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