Al Stump (October 20, 1916 – December 14, 1995), was an American author and Sports writer. Stump spent a great deal of time with Ty Cobb before Cobb's death. Stump wrote one book with Cobb, one book on Cobb and a handful of magazine articles about the time the two men spent together. The books are titled My Life in Baseball: The True Record and Cobb: A Biography.
My Life in Baseball was ghostwritten by Stump. Cobb: A Biography was a follow up piece written after Cobb died. It was a reflection by Stump on his time with Cobb.[1]
The Stump autobiography came out a few months after Cobb's death. Thirty years later, Stump wrote his own biography of Cobb.
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Stump said afterward that he found Cobb rather difficult to work with most of the time. Long after the publication of the book, he claimed that Cobb's editorial control over the autobiography resulted in the book not telling the truth about Cobb as Stump saw it.
During a visit to the Cobb family mausoleum in December 1960, Stump alleged that Cobb told him about the murder of his father, and pointed the finger at his mother. But at the time of the film, Stump claimed that another man was responsible.
The Stump autobiography came out a few months after Cobb's death. The autobiography (My Life in Baseball by Ty Cobb) painted Ty in a sympathetic light. Thirty years later, however, Stump published a new book (Cobb: A Biography), which offered a very negative and unsympathic portrait of Cobb. In 1994 the writing of the book was used as the basis for a film starring Tommy Lee Jones as Cobb and Robert Wuhl as Stump.
In 2010, an article by William R. "Ron" Cobb (no relation to Ty) in The National Pastime, official publication of the Society for American Baseball Research, accused Al Stump of extensive forgeries of Cobb-related documents and diaries and even of having falsely claimed to possess a shotgun used by Cobb's mother to kill his father (in a well-known incident officially ascribed to her having mistaken him for an intruder). The shotgun later came into the hands of noted memorabilia collector Barry Halper, but in reality Cobb's father had been killed by a pistol. The article further accused Stump of numerous false statements about Cobb in his last years, most of which were sensationalistic in nature and intended to cast Cobb in an unflattering light.[2]