Ty Cobb Baseball Bat Game-used Bat, ca. 1924
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GUEST:
Well, the item that I brought in today was a baseball bat that was given to my father from Ty Cobb. My father owned a dealership in the Detroit area, and Mr. Cobb came in to buy a car one day, and he happened to have a couple of bats in his car and he offered one of them up to my father as a partial down payment for the car. He accepted it, and this was in 1924, and I inherited it in 1953.
APPRAISER:
Well, 1914 is the patent date right here, and that's for the Kork Grip. Now, Ty Cobb was credited with inventing the Kork Grip technology.
GUEST:
Oh, I didn't know that.
APPRAISER:
It's on the handle there. And what else do you remember them telling you about the bat?
GUEST:
Not a whole lot, because back in those days, they used to take a lot of different things. They took mules, horses, whatever they could come up with to pay for a car because times were kind of lean, to say the least.
APPRAISER:
It's a Model 40K, so this was a professional model bat that was made for Ty Cobb and occasionally was also given to other players, major and minor league. So what's important here is that we have the provenance about how the bat was acquired. We also have the Louisville Slugger catalogue number that's stamped into the end of the bat handle. That also tells us it was one of the professional model bats manufactured for Ty Cobb to his specifications. This is 34 inches in length, 38 ounces, and matches up to the records for Louisville Slugger for a Ty Cobb bat. The bat was manufactured between 1916 and 1929, so that fits again also with the timeline you said where the bat was given to your father in 1924. We also, looking at the condition, there's no cracks. The Kork Grip is still in decent shape for how delicate that was, and we have nice use on it, too. We have some nice ball marks, some cleat marks. It's got everything you want in a game-used bat from that time period from a Hall of Famer such as Ty Cobb. I also particularly like the real deep facsimile signature on the barrel. Any bats that had more use than this won't always have as deep of a stamp. There's not a whole lot of Ty Cobb game-used bats that come up for auction. This particular bat we would put an estimation of it at $14,000 to $18,000 at auction.
GUEST:
Wow, that is a big surprise. Well, I'm glad I didn't use this for Little League.
APPRAISER:
No, I'm glad you didn't, too. That's a beautiful example.
GUEST:
Thank you so much.
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