Alvin John "Al" Stump (October 20, 1916 – December 14, 1995), was an American author and sports writer. Stump spent time with Detroit Tigers' Hall Of Fame baseball player Ty Cobb in 1960 and 1961 collaborating on Cobb's autobiography. My Life In Baseball: A True Record was released shortly after Cobb's death. From this research, Stump later went on to write at least two books and at least one magazine article on Cobb.Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball and Cobb: A Biography were follow-up pieces written over thirty years after Cobb died. Both books, represented by Stump as a reflection on his time with Cobb, have now been discredited as sensationalized and, in large part, fictional.
In 2010, the veracity of Stump's reminiscences of Ty Cobb that are recounted in the book that is the basis of the 1994 film Cobb (1994) were called into question in an article by William R. "Ron" Cobb (no relation to Ty). The article, published in "The National Pastime" (official publication of the Society for American Baseball Research), accused Stump of extensive forgeries of Cobb-related documents and diaries. The article accused Stump 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.
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