Today we jumped into the Jimmy James way back machine and took a trip back to the early 1900’s to visit with the greatest baseball player in the history of the game, Ty Cobb ‘The Georgia Peach”
We were just cruising around looking for neat things, and there it was a big sign that said, “Welcome to Royston, Ga – Hometown of Ty Cobb”. Now since we’re two of the biggest baseball nuts and both being big Tiger fans we knew we were going to be making a few stops in this town. The next sign was pointing us to the Ty Cobb Museum so that’s where we went. After giving up our $5 we ran into the museum and found a display of a hundred bats with the 100 high points of his life engraved on them, from there we moved on to the displays with old and rare pictures showing his rise from a small town baseball team to being the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. They had one of his old playing gloves with three fingers, the gold metal that was given to him when he won his first batting title and a photo of him at an old timers game with a young Al Kaline. We found out the Ty Cobb holds more baseball records then any other player and was always known as an aggressive, mean and fierce (SOB) competitor but after touring the museum and watching the 20-minute movie we changed your minds about that. Cobb was the first sports player to endorse a product, he picked a little down home company in Georgia that was just starting out, Coca Cola, which made him a multimillionaire. He used the money to build the areas first hospital, in Royston, that is now the center of their healthcare system, which serves thousands in Northeast Georgia each year. He set aside 25% of his fortune to establish the Cobb Scholarship Fund, more then 6000 Georgian boys and girls have received an education at over 200 different colleges because of it. Yes the greatest hitter in the game of baseball, the master of the base paths, the man with the sharpen spikes had a very generous heart, he just never showed it on the ball field.
As Casey Stengel once said “I never saw anyone like Ty Cobb. No one even came close to him as the greatest all-time player. That guy was superhuman, amazing”.
And of course we had to find the cemetery that he was buried in, when we found the family tomb, we discovered that some fan had left a beautiful basket of Georgia peaches on the steps.
