Sixty years after his death, Ty Cobb is coming back to life, thanks to a scorebook that documents part of his first professional baseball season.
You can learn a lot from a baseball scorebook. Or, as University of Central Florida history professor Richard Crepeau wrote in 1993, “on two small pages the basic skeleton of a baseball game, inning by inning, is laid out in some detail, and anyone going to it can reconstruct a significant portion of a game.”
At the time, Crepeau was referring to a scorebook that a UCF colleague, art professor Robert Rivers, dropped on his desk that year. Contained in the scorebook, once owned by Rivers’ grandfather, were 21 home games of the 1904 Noblemen of Anniston, Alabama. What makes that significant is that Cobb, at 17 years old, was playing the outfield for Anniston. It shows in detail how Cobb did in home games between May 16 and July 9, 1904.
That dark red scorebook has been loaned to the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston, Georgia. It will go on exhibit at the museum on Saturday, Dec. 18, which is the 135th anniversary of Cobb’s birth.
“We’re very, very excited,” said Leah McCall, manager of the Ty Cobb Museum. “And we’re looking forward to displaying it.”
The book, which measures 5 inches by 8 inches, has a handwritten notation on the first page that reads “Anniston Base Ball Parks Association.” This slice of baseball history has been in the possession of Birmingham, Alabama, residents Tom Rivers (brother of Robert Rivers) and his daughter, Rachael Waters.
It was passed to the Rivers brothers, and Tom Rivers said the scorebook had been largely forgotten.
“It stayed in a box on a shelf at my lakeside house for years,” said Tom Rivers, 70.
Tom Rivers said his brother gave the scorebook to Waters as a wedding gift six years ago, although he confessed that nobody in his family followed baseball that much.
“None of us are baseball fans,” he said.
But surely, he thumbed through the scorebook to take a look, right?
“I love to say that I did, but I didn’t,” Tom Rivers laughed.
Ron Cobb, a board member at the Ty Cobb Museum, was more than happy to take a look when he visited Rivers in September to make a pitch for the scorebook.
“That is the neatest thing,” the 77-year-old said. “It was absolutely unique to hold something that was 115 years old.
“It’s not something you just glance at.”
What makes the scorebook special, McCall said, is that even though the scorekeeper used a pencil to track the games, the pages are remarkably readable.
“A good bit of it appeared to be written in pencil,” McCall said. “All of the writing was still legible.”
Ron Cobb wanted the Rivers family to donate the artifact, but family members decided to allow the scorebook to be displayed for an “extended period of time.” The exact length is uncertain, but Cobb believes it is in the “three to five-year range.”
“I asked Tom straight up if he’d like to donate it, and they said, ‘Why don’t you just display it?’” Ron Cobb said.
“We knew it was special,” Tom Rivers said.
Ron Cobb said the museum had the scorebook “imaged in high resolution” and made separate pages in plastics sleeves that fans can thumb through at the museum. The original scorebook will be protected under glass.
If not for the scorebook, Cobb’s first summer as a pro baseball might have been buried among scattered, obscure box scores in newspapers from Anniston, Knoxville, Chattanooga and Birmingham.
The Anniston Noblemen were one of eight teams in the newly formed Tennessee-Alabama League. According to a Birmingham News story on March 2, 1904, the team was organized and George E. Cater was elected president. The following month, the team joined the Tennessee-Alabama League and George B. Groves, of Tampa, Florida, was hired as manager.
The league, classified as independent, fielded teams in Anniston, Bessemer, Chattanooga, Columbia, Decatur, Huntsville, Knoxville and Sheffield.
Cobb made his debut with the Anniston Noblemen on May 16, 1904. Anniston was hosting Bessemer in a three-game series. A newspaper account noted that Anniston won all three games, but the scorebook tells a different story, showing that Anniston lost 9-4 to the Marvels in the first game.
In his debut, Cobb played left field and went 1-for-4, scoring a run.
The Anniston Star, in its May 18, 1904, edition, noted that the official scorer for the Noblemen’s game was George Joel Stone. The team nickname had been chosen the day before, and the team christened its new name on May 17 with a 12-5 victory against Bessemer,
Cobb played center field on May 17, and, according to the Star, went 2-for-4 with a double and triple, scoring two runs. He also excelled in the field, the newspaper reported.
“Cobb covered himself with glory in the sixth,” according to the game account in the Star. “It was a running catch of the hair-raising variety and would have been an easy three-bagger.”
Anniston played 45 games in 1904 and was 17-28 when the team disbanded on July 11, 1904. “Gives up the Ghost,” the Star blared in a July 12 headline about the Noblemen, who were sixth in the eight-team league and were 15½ games behind first place Knoxville. Bessemer also folded, prompting The Chattanooga Times to run a more colorful headline, “Two of the Clubs Throw Up Sponge.” Poor attendance in both cities were cited as the cause for the teams’ dropping out of the league.
The team’s final game was July 9, 1904 — a 4-3 loss to the Columbia Giants at home.
“The Anniston baseball team started out pretty strong, but it ‘fell down’ woefully at the end,” The Knoxville Sentinel wrote.
On days the Noblemen didn’t play, Cobb sat at the counter in Lindsay Scarbrough’s drugstore in Anniston and wrote postcards, letters and telegrams to sportswriter Grantland Rice, signing them as “Jack Smith,” or Brown, Jackson or Jones. In those letters, Ty Cobb touted himself to Rice, who then wrote glowing reports of the young outfielder after visiting Anniston to see for himself. That would allow Cobb to return to Augusta to finish out the 1904 season and play a good portion of the 1905 season there. He made his major league debut with the Detroit Tigers on Aug. 30, 1905.
The existence of the scorebook originally came to light in an Aug. 18, 1968, article in the Anniston Star.
“Without Anniston the game of baseball would have never heard of (Ty Cobb),” sports editor Bill Plott stated in his lengthy piece about the Georgia Peach’s time in Alabama.
Finding complete statistics for Ty Cobb’s first year has proven to be elusive.
“I want to find a stat head who would dig into it,” Ron Cobb said.
How the scorebook came into the hands of the Rivers family is a partial mystery. It originally belonged to Edward Lloyd Rivers, the grandfather of Tom and Robert Rivers. Lloyd Rivers, as he was known, was a year younger than Ty Cobb and played some semipro baseball in the Anniston area.
“I have one of his gloves,” Tom Rivers said.
Lloyd Rivers was 72 when he died on Oct. 13, 1959, in Jacksonville, Alabama, after a career as an insurance salesman. The elder Rivers and his wife, Sarah “Libbie” Porter Rivers, “moved to a farm,” where the fathers of Tom and Robert Rivers grew up.
Tom Rivers said his father delivered newspapers on a horse and served during World War II even though he lied about his age.
When Libbie Rivers died on Jan. 28, 1990, at the age of 90, the scorebook was passed along to Tom and Robert Rivers.
The detail in the book is intricate, and not because of its legibility. The scorebook noted that the game began at 3:30 p.m. local time and took only 2:14 to play. Gate receipts totaled $86.80.
“There is no documented proof that this was the ‘official’ scorebook – it might have been the team’s scorebook,” Ron Cobb said. “But it does have all the earmarks of an official book because of the detail.”
And the condition is not bad for a relic from the early 20th century.
“It was in fairly nice shape,” McCall said. “It has one water spot.
“The outside is amazing, just like the inside.”
Tom Rivers said the family has been approached before by private collectors wanting to buy the scorebook, but he preferred it be accessible to the public.
“I could not find anyone who could put a price on it,” he said. “So we thought it would be better to share it with the baseball world.”
