In short: Probably not, but he may have claimed he did. In long:

Years after his playing career ended, Ty Cobb collaborated with sportswriter Al Stump on an autobiography. According to Stump, Cobb told him, “In 1912 — and you can write this down — I killed a man in Detroit.”

The quote comes up with some frequency around this time every year, since the character clause in Hall of Fame voting criteria is keeping some great players out of Cooperstown for taking performance-enhancing drugs when the league was doing nothing to prevent it, and meanwhile inaugural Hall of Famer Ty Cobb might have actually murdered a dude.

It’s about as explicit a confession as you’ll ever hear, but Cobb had nearly 50 years to sensationalize the incident in his head. Original newspaper reports from the time don’t exactly corroborate the boast, and some — including Ted Williams, among others — have questioned the veracity of Stump’s stories about Cobb.

Most accounts have it that a group of three men attacked Cobb while he was driving with his wife in August, 1912 in Detroit, and some have it that he fought back. Beyond that, the details are murky.

From the Smithsonian:

As to the incident in Detroit in 1912, Stump quoted Cobb as saying he killed one of his attackers, beating the man with the butt of his Belgian pistol, then using the gun’s sight as a blade and “slash away until the man’s face was faceless.” The writer also quoted Cobb as saying: “Left him there, not breathing, in his own rotten blood.” In a later biography of Cobb, Stump added that a few days after the attack in Detroit, “a press report told of an unidentified body found off Trumbull Avenue in an alley.”

At the time, press reports did mention an attack on Ty Cobb. An Associated Press dispatch the following day described an attempted robbery of Cobb by three assailants who “were under the influence of liquor.” A “battle royal” followed, the report said, and one of his would-be robbers pulled a knife and slashed Cobb in the back, after which “all three men made their getaway.” The Syracuse Herald reported that on the day after the attack, Cobb got two hits in the exhibition game against the Syracuse Stars but did not exert himself because of “a severe knife wound in his back.” Other reports had blood seeping through Cobb’s uniform….

Doug Roberts, a lawyer and former prosecutor, had doubts about Stump’s account and did extensive research into the incident for a 1996 article for The National Pastime, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Society for American Baseball Research. After examining autopsy records at the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office and after combing through all of the Detroit newspapers from the time, Roberts concluded that Stump’s claim that an unidentified body had been reported in the press was not true. Roberts also found no record of any deaths due to blunt force trauma in Detroit in August 1912.

A FOX Sports report shows that Cobb might have changed or exaggerated the story within only a day of it happening:

In Cobb’s first interview, given to a Syracuse paper, he said that the men recognized him, and realized they had cut him with their knife, they fled. No one was injured, other than Cobb.

By the next day, though, things were already starting to change. Cobb now said that he had knocked one of the attackers down with the butt of his gun. Still no major injuries, but now the infamous third mugger had gotten down on his knees to beg for forgiveness.

By the late 1950s, according to Stump, Cobb was bragging that he beat the guy to death. But based on Roberts’ research, it seems unlikely that Ty Cobb actually killed a man in 1912.

No one ever accused Ty Cobb of being a great guy. He had a reputation for aggressive and sometimes dirty play, with baseball lore insisting he sharpened his spikes to injure opponents. Earlier in 1912, he got suspended 10 games after jumping into the crowd in New York to beat up a heckler who had no hands, and got into bloody fights with umpires. But he probably wasn’t a murderer.