Baseball Museum 15: Ty Cobb Museum

On July 13, 2009, on our way to the Atlanta area we stopped at the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston, Georgia. The museum is a rather small one inside the professional building of the Ty Cobb Healthcare complex, but it does use the small space well. Also, being in a healthcare building they really care about being accessible. The door into the building is automatic, but the one into the museum is not and they were apologetic about it. The exhibit itself is easy to navigate with the wheelchair, especially since there were no other visitors until we were leaving. The displays were also for the most part easy to see from Mik’s height although he was just playing his PSP the whole time except during the movie. The theater did not exactly have wheelchair seating, but it was a flat room and there was room along the side for Mik to roll up and not entirely block the aisle.

The Ty Cobb Museum begins with a display of bats. This is really cool and almost my favorite part of the whole museum. The bats are engraved to tell about the highlights of Ty Cobbs life mainly focusing on his baseball career. The engravings include things like his birth in 1886, being sold to the Tigers in 1905, hitting his first Major League home run in 1905, his final game in 1928, and being the first player voted into the Hall of Fame in 1936.

The exhibits then continue in a sort of time line fashion about his life from childhood through to his baseball career and life after baseball. There is a decent amount of memorabilia related to Ty Cobb on display including baseball cards, one of his gloves, balls signed by him, a Tigers uniform worn by him, and even his dentures. One of the most in depth displays is about the Ty Cobb Style of Baseball from his hitting style to base running style.

My favorite display was the one about Ty Cobb and Coca Cola. Ty Cobb became a wealthy man and it was not really from playing baseball. His wealth mainly came from smart investing and part of his investments were in the Coca Cola Company. A whole display case shows items related to his ties with Coca Cola. This includes ads featuring him and special Coca Cola bottles commemorating Ty Cobb.

In the museum there is a short movie about Ty Cobb. It is nice that the movie plays on demand rather than at specific times like at larger museums and even some smaller museums. It took a few times of pressing the button to get it to finally start up the projector and play the movie, but it did work in the end.

Overall the Ty Cobb Museum was a worthwhile detour on the way to Atlanta and it was worth staying in South Carolina two nights in order to get to the museum when it was open on Monday, since there is no way we could have made it before it closed on Saturday and it is closed on Sundays.

Before leaving we went to the souvenir shop to get our normal souvenirs of a mini bat and souvenir baseball. Mik also choose one of the limited edition Ty Cobb baseball cards made just for the museum. It was about $10, but it comes in a protector case with a Ty Cobb Museum gold sticker on the opening and is numbered 176 of 376, so it is a cool collectible. We also got a pack of Topps 2009 Series 1 cards. We did not get anything very rare or anything in the pack, but it was cool that we got a Roger Maris Legends of the Game card. Those cards are not in every pack (I think only one in every six pack odds) and the Legend we got was cool because we went to the Roger Maris Museum earlier on this trip.