Word: cobb
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...following season was the first of the 15 years that Rose hit .300 or better, the first of his ten seasons with 200 hits or more, a feat unmatched even by Cobb. Last season, throughout major league baseball, only four men accumulated 200 hits. Looking at Rose's and Cobb's distinction the simplest way, all anyone must do to gather 4,191 hits is to come up with 200 a year for 20 years and then get 191 more. Against this standard last week, the 3,000th hit of seven-time Batting Champion Rod Carew, 39, splendid...
...first day in the majors, the centerfielder walked, then took off for second base. Eighty years later, players are still trying to catch Ty Cobb. Maury Wills first did it in 1962 when he ran by the old mark of 96 stolen bases in a season. Now Pete Rose, barring calamity, will exceed the hallowed record of 4,191 hits. But, like Wills, he will surpass only the man, not the icon...
Even in his playing years Cobb assumed a mythic stature. The garrulous Casey Stengel summed up his contemporary in a lone sentence: "It was like he was superhuman." Others would say subhuman. On his most courteous afternoons, Cobb slid in, spikes high and sharpened to maim. He wrangled with teammates, two wives, five children and innumerable ticket holders. When a New York fan taunted him, Cobb climbed into the stands and stomped the offender. It was later pointed out that the stompee had been missing all of one hand and three fingers of the other. Cobb replied tenderly...
...voted in at the 1936 start. The battle of self-destruction and will began back in rural Georgia, when the teenage hunter accidentally shot himself with a .22 rifle. The bullet lodged in the vicinity of his clavicle and remained there for the rest of his life. Tyrus Raymond Cobb's father, W.H., a school commissioner, thought of his son as a potential doctor or lawyer. As Professor Cobb saw it, baseball players were drunken, wenching, low-salaried louts. He relented when Ty refused to go to college, but the old man warned him, "Don't come home a failure...
...Cobb was to come home successfully 2,245 times in the big leagues, but his father saw none of those achievements. W.H. was shotgunned twice on the evening of Aug. 8, 1905. His wife pulled the trigger. She had mistaken him, she claimed, for an intruder. Three weeks later, amid rumors about his parents' marital squabbles, infidelity and murder, the red-haired 18-year-old fought his way into the Detroit Tigers' lineup. But he saw no reason to rejoice. "I only thought," he recalled, "father won't know...