Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 175, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 July 1919 — SIX WEEKS’TRAINING IS TOO MUCH-COBB [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

SIX WEEKS’TRAINING IS TOO MUCH-COBB

Tiger Star Says Player Should Remember Length of Season. Looks Like Folly to Georgia Peach for Player to Drain His Endurance in South— -Has His Own Idea of Training. Ty Cobb answers the critics of his training camp methods by the assertion that the routine of one month or six weeks is entirely too long for the ball player. For many seasons Cobb has refused to report to the Tigers when they entrained for Dixieland. Rarely has he Jumped into uniform earlier than a week or ten days before the opening of the regular season. Cobb’s enemies repeatedly declared that failure to train would handicap Cobb considerably. But it has never been so. Several times the “Southern Typhoon” has started slowly, but along about mid June he has found his stride and breezed along to the sublime heights of the offensive baseball world. “Four to six weeks training in the South, with two sessions daily, hurt rather than help a player,” Cobb explains. “After two weeks in the South the player is trained rather fine. After that strenuous training begins to sap his endurance. When the season opens he looks good and

plays well. But before mid August you will notice that he is growing stale; that he isn’t playing with all the old dash and speed. “It would be all-right for a player to train four to six weeks if he was going to play only for about two months. But when he is conditioning himself for six months’ play it seems like folly to me to force him to drain his endurance powers in the South and bring him North with not enough left to carry him through six months of play. "Early in my career I spent four to six weeks in training camps. Usually I reported for the opening of the season in fine condition. But after about two months I would begin to get a little stale. My work would lack zip. I decided finally that it was because I was overtrained. So One season I did not report to the camp for the full training season, but merely put in about ten days’ work. As a result I was able to put into the regular playing season all the endurance that was necessary and I carried it along right through to the end of the season. Instead of finishing the baseball year fagged and worn out and trained off, I was Just as good physically as when the season began. And ever since then I’ve followed that system of training Just enough to get the kinks out of my arms and legs without the sacrifice of stamina.”

Ty Cobb.