Ty Cobb's Stock Portfolio Was a Grand Slam

Hello! This is Deep Pockets #28.

Pretend for a moment that “Field of Dreams” actually happened. As in, a space-time wormhole opened in an Iowa cornfield, and a bunch of baseball players from a hundred years ago stepped into the present day. And let’s say one of those time-traveling baseball players was Ty Cobb.

In case you were not aware, Ty Cobb is one of the greatest baseball players of all time. You will not find a ranking of the all-time best baseball players that does not feature Ty Cobb in the top five. On ESPN’s list, Ty ranks #4 behind Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Babe Ruth. The Baseball Almanac ranks him #3 behind Willie and Babe.

Even though it’s been nearly 100 years since he retired, Ty Cobb still holds the record for the highest career batting average (.366), most five-hit games (14), most batting titles (12), and most stolen home bases (54). In fact, many of the roughly 9,000 MLB records he set stood for decades after his retirement. Ty was the FIRST player inducted into the Hall of Fame, receiving 98.2% of the vote, a ratio that would not be topped for another half-century.

Given these stats, if today’s baseball stars were in Iowa on the day Ty Cobb walked out of a center-field wormhole, I would understand why they would bug him for advice on how to improve their game (especially their hitting).

BUT THAT WOULD BE A MISTAKE.

Today’s players would be much better off bugging Ty Cobb for advice on how to make tons and tons of money.

Before we dive into this incredible story, and it is incredible, I want to dispel a myth about Ty Cobb -

When you ask the average person what they know about Ty Cobb, they typically say three things:

• 1) He was one of the best baseball players of all time.

• 2) He sharpened his cleat spikes to cut opposing players as he slid into base.

• 3) He was a vile racist.

The first point is 100% true.

The second point is 100% true.

The third point is 100% false.

According to one legend, he once beat up a black groundskeeper over the condition of the field and then choked the man’s wife when she ran out to help her husband. He also apparently pistol-whipped a black person for having the nerve to share the sidewalk with him. He was also supposedly a card-carrying member of the KKK.

None of these stories are true.

In reality, there is not a shred of evidence that Ty Cobb was racist at all. He supported the integration of black players and, throughout his life, was charitable to people of all races. If you want to know more, you can read this story from MLB.com that completely debunks the Ty Cobb racism myth and explains how it came to be.

Ok, on with our Deep Dive…

DEEP DIVE: How Ty Cobb Became One of the Richest Athletes Ever

Tyrus Raymond Cobb was born in December 1886 in Narrows, Georgia, a tiny unincorporated rural area about two hours (in a modern vehicle) northeast of Atlanta. If you recall from our previous Deep Pockets story, Coca-Cola was invented in May 1886, not far from where Ty was born. This will be important in a moment.

When he was still an infant, his family moved to Royston, Georgia.

Ty despised his school teachers, rarely attended class, and practically relished in failing his exams. Fortunately, his superior skills on the baseball field landed him a spot on a series of minor league teams all over the South. As he left for his first minor league team, Cobb's father sent him off with these gentle parting words:

"Don't come home a failure."

After bouncing around for a few seasons and earning no more than $50 a year, Ty’s contract was acquired by the Detroit Tigers in 1905 for $750.

Tragically, just three weeks before his professional debut, Ty's mother accidentally shot and killed his father. Ty's father had suspected his wife of cheating and was sneaking into their bedroom to catch her in the act. She mistook him for an intruder and killed him at point-blank range with a shotgun blast. This obviously traumatized Ty for the rest of his life. Years later, he would attribute his aggressive playing style to the fact that his father never saw him in a big league game. For the rest of his life, Ty was obsessively driven to prove to his father that he never became a failure.

Ty earned $1,200 in his first year with the Tigers. During that season, he lived in a $10-a-week boarding house.

He struggled a bit in his rookie season, but after learning how to conquer the curveball, it was game over. Within two years of making his professional debut, Ty was leading the league in hitting, with a batting average of .350.

In the 1907 season, he earned $2,500. In the 1908 season, he earned $5,000.

In 1909, after leading the Tigers to three straight American League pennants, Ty’s salary was boosted to $9,000 per year. That’s the same as making around $312,000 per year today.

As you know, Ty Cobb had very little formal schooling, so his knowledge of financial management and investing was non-existent. You might assume that an uneducated Georgia farmboy with a little money in the bank for the first time went out and blew his paycheck on women, booze, and toys. After all, that’s what his teammates were doing.

Nope. And this is probably the first sign that Ty Cobb was built differently than your average professional athlete.

When Ty Cobb finally started making real money, he didn’t hang out at bars, fancy hotels, or the race track on his days off. He started hanging out at the Detroit Stock Exchange, soaking up everything he could about investing.

Tapping his Georgia farm roots, one of his first financial investments was buying $1,000 worth of cotton futures (a bet that the price of cotton would be higher in the future). Having grown up around farmers, Ty sensed that the price of cotton was low. When he sold his investment two years later, he made a $7,500 profit. Keep in mind his annual baseball salary was $9,000, so this was a huge win!

For his next investment idea, Ty looked right under his nose… on his desk. Detroit had lost the World Series three years in a row, from 1907 – 1909, but each time, Ty and his teammates were given a consolation ring made from copper. After staring at those three rings on his desk, Cobb became convinced that the price of metals was low. He scoured the country for a good metal investment, eventually identifying a copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona. Cobb bought 400 shares of the copper mine at $3 per share. When he sold those shares a few years later, he made a $15,000 profit (around $500,000 in today’s dollars).

In 1913, Ty became the first baseball player to earn a five-figure salary when he signed a contract with Detroit that paid him $12,000 for the season. That’s the same as around $380,000 today.

These big wins would soon be puny compared to what happened next…

Endorsement Income

For whatever reason, perhaps it was his father’s warning not to come home a failure, but Ty Cobb was obsessed with building income and assets outside of his ability to swing a bat.

He was quick to jump onto the endorsement train. Cobb endorsed cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, laxatives, chewing gum, Louisville Sluggers, baseball gloves, and even a line of Ty Cobb-branded suspenders.

In the off-season, he traveled to state fairs around the country, making $1,000 a day in appearance fees.

He even dipped his toes into Hollywood. In 1917, he was paid $25,000 ($616,000 today) to star in a movie titled “Somewhere in Georgia.” In the movie, he played a modest bank teller in Georgia named… “Ty Cobb.” His character, “Ty Cobb,” was so good at baseball that he landed a contract with a professional team called the… “Detroit Tigers.” It was a serious acting stretch. No copies of the film exist today.

With every side job paycheck, Ty poured his money into the stock market.

In 1918, the year World War 1 ended, the best players in baseball were making $6,000 a year. Ty’s salary by this point was $20,000. More importantly, thanks to his stock investments, his net worth was $300,000. That’s the same as being worth around $6.3 million in today’s dollars.

Ty could have retired right then and spent the rest of his life on a beach, but he continued playing through 1928. He also was a manager. And I don’t mean he became a manager after retiring. From 1921 to 1926, Ty played center field AND was the manager of the Tigers. He made $32,500 for his combined player/manager duties.

While all this was going on, Ty was quietly building an extremely impressive stock portfolio. A stock portfolio that made him BY FAR the richest athlete in the world. His two biggest stock wins were:

• Coca-Cola

• General Motors.

Coca-Cola Investment

Ty appeared in his first Coca-Cola ad in 1907 (four years after cocaine was removed).

Ty and Coca-Cola were an endorsement match made in heaven. Both the player and the product were born in Georgia in 1886, just a few months apart, and Ty genuinely loved Coke.

Below is the first 1907 Ty Cobb Coca-Cola ad. In case you can’t read the text, under “Ty Cobb Says,” his endorsement reads:

“I drink Coca-Cola regularly throughout all seasons of the year. On days when we are playing a double-header, I always find that a drink of Coca-Cola between the games refreshes me to such an extent that I can start the second game feeling as if I had not been exercising at all, in spite of my exertions in the first.”

If you’ll recall from our previous Deep Pockets story, in 1907 The Coca-Cola Company was owned by Asa Candler Riggs. In 1919, Riggs’ children sold the company to an investor named Ernest Woodruff. Woodruff took the company public that same year. In 1923, he made his son, Robert Woodruff, company president.

Robert Woodruff and Ty Cobb had a lot in common. They were both born in Georgia, just a few years apart. They both had a rebellious side. They both loved hunting. And they both had genius-level minds for business.

Even before Robert became company president, he and Ty spent many off-season days sharing investment strategies while hunting on Robert’s 37,000-acre estate outside of Atlanta.

At Robert’s urging, soon after the 1919 IPO, Ty bought 300 shares of Coca-Cola for $36 a share. That purchase would have cost $10,800, which is around $200,000 in today’s dollars. Ty didn’t have to tap his own savings for the purchase. He took out a loan from an Atlanta bank for the $10,800. The bank happened to be owned by Robert’s dad, Ernest Woodruff.

This early stake in Coca-Cola would eventually be the first crown jewel in Ty Cobb’s investment portfolio.

Thanks to Robert Woodruff’s genius marketing strategies, Coca-Cola exploded in popularity in the 1920s and 1930s. By the end of World War II in 1945, the brand was an iconic global symbol of freedom and America.

Along the way, Ty’s relationship with Coca-Cola moved beyond paid endorser. In 1940, he bought a bottling plant in Idaho. He would soon buy additional Coke bottling plants in Oregon and California.

When Ty Cobb died in 1961, he owned 24,000 shares of Coca-Cola. Those shares were worth $2 million. That’s the same as around $21 million today.

General Motors Investment

The second, and much larger, crown jewel in Ty’s investment portfolio was General Motors.

As the star player for a baseball team playing in Detroit, Ty Cobb was the perfect endorser for America’s burgeoning automotive industry. One of Ty’s early endorsements was for a car company called United Motors. Seeing how quickly the car industry was growing right around him, Ty took a $25,000 endorsement payday and used it to buy United Motors shares.

In 1918, United Motors was acquried by General Motors for $45 million. Instead of accepting cash in the buyout, Ty converted his payday into General Motors shares.

Because his original United Motors shares were purchased at such an early stage, he was entitled to HUGE quarterly dividend payments. Those dividends went right back into buying more GM shares.

At the time of his death in 1961, Ty Cobb owned $10 million worth of General Motors shares. After adjusting for inflation, today that’s the same as…

$105 million

Between just his Coca-Cola and GM shares, at his death in 1961, Ty Cobb’s investment portfolio was worth $12 million. That’s around $126 million after adjusting for inflation.

That’s not all.

In his later years, Ty’s stock portfolio was generating $450,000 per year in dividends. That’s the same as around $5 million per year today.

That’s not all.

Ty famously hated the extremely hot and humid summers of his Georgia childhood. Ty owned hundreds of acres of property in Georgia but had no interest in living or retiring there. So, in 1930, he moved all the way to California, where he built a mansion in the affluent Bay Area suburb of Atherton, California. His home in Atherton (which today is one of the most expensive zip codes in America) had a direct line stock ticker to the East Coast markets so he could follow his investments, an extreme rarity at the time.

After moving to California, Ty became exposed to Lake Tahoe and Reno, Nevada (mainly from drinking and gambling excursions). In 1933, at the depths of the Great Depression, Ty purchased land in Lake Tahoe for a summer retreat.

He didn’t just buy a few acres. Because it was the depths of the Great Depression, Ty bought what would later be described as “half of Lake Tahoe” for pennies.

At the time of his death, Ty’s Lake Tahoe real estate was worth another $20 million. That’s the same as $210 million today.

In July 2023, the lakefront Tahoe estate Ty built in 1938 was sold for a bit under $10 million. Here’s a video tour:

Richest Athlete in the World

Bringing it all together…

If you combine his General Motors ($10 million), Coke ($2 million), and Tahoe investments ($20 million), Ty Cobb was worth at least $32 million in 1961.

Today, that’s the same as around…

$340 million

Philanthropy

Ty Cobb died on July 17, 1961, at Emory University Hospital (which, by this point, was being generously supported by Coca-Cola dollars via the Woodruff brothers). He was 74.

According to the terms of his will, a quarter of his estate went towards establishing the Ty Cobb Educational Foundation. To date, the foundation has helped thousands of low-income Georgians to attend college. According to the foundation’s website:

“As of April 2024, scholarships have been awarded totaling $21,064,024.”

That’s not all.

A decade before he died, Ty donated $100,000 to build a 24-bed state-of-the-art hospital in his hometown of Royston, Georgia. Upon his death, Ty’s will set aside a large portion of his Coca-Cola share to support that hospital and expand beyond Royston. Today, the Ty Cobb Healthcare System operates eight full-service hospitals and assisted living facilities in Georgia.

I think it’s safe to say that Ty Cobb fulfilled his father’s request to not come home a failure 😀 

A Final Fun Hypothetical

What would Ty Cobb’s 24,000 Coca-Cola shares be worth today?

Ty owned 24,000 shares of Coca-Cola in 1961. After eight stock splits over the next few decades, those 24,000 shares would have become 9,216,000 shares. As I type this story, Coke stock trades for around $63 a share. So, that stake would be worth $580 million.

But that’s not all!

If you’ll recall from our previous story, in 2012 the Coca-Cola Company ran the math to calculate how much a single share purchased at the 1919 IPO was worth if all dividends had been reinvested over the decades. The answer was $9.8 million (in 2012). Recall that Ty bought 300 shares of Coca-Cola for $10,800 soon after the IPO.

If Ty left his Coca-Cola shares in a trust and instructed that no shares ever be sold and all dividends be reinvested, by 2012, his Coke stock would have been worth…

$2,940,000,000

That’s $2.94 BILLION… and that’s as of 2012… without factoring in the last decade+ of dividends being reinvested or the increase in the stock price. It’s safe to bet that Ty Cobb’s 300 Coca-Cola shares from 1919 would be worth well over $3 billion today.

And, as you know, Coca-Cola wasn’t even Ty’s biggest stock asset! I can’t begin to fathom what his GM shares would be worth today after a hundred years of growth and dividends.

FINAL WORD

On the next edition of “Deep Pockets,” we’ll talk about the actual richest athlete of all time… Michael Jordan.

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