Did I mention that Frank Chance had some HOF teammates? Here's one!
I see
Ty Cobb's career as more instructive than exciting. But it's exciting in its own way. First the excitement. Ty Cobb played forever. My Cobb was a couple hundred at bats ahead of the actual Ty Cobb, which is pretty amazing, since he ranks 5th all-time in real life. My Cobb is #1, nobody ever had more at bats than Cobb, though he is only #2 in plate appearances. More significantly, he is #1 all time in hits with 3528. He's #2 in doubles, #1 in triples, #4 in stolen bases, #4 in runs.
But all of that overrates him by quite a bit. My Cobb played center field for the first seven years of his career. But then in 1912, at age 25, he got moved over to left field permanently. I have no record of why this happened - whether this was due to bad defense or maybe the Senators acquired a better CF. Either way he was in LF for most of his career. And he wasn't the best LF of his era. He wasn't even a .300 hitter for most of his career, until the live ball came around in the 20's and raised everyone's batting stats.
My Cobb was a good center fielder, but not as good as Tris Speaker, who showed up a few years after him. When he moved to LF, he was among the best, but maybe not as good as Max Carey. Then when he got to his thirties, George Burns was definitely superior. Cobb was a star, just not a superstar.
But he was a good player for a really long time, like 21 years before he finally got old. Which brings me to how Cobb is instructive. I have player development on, so while players start at something resembling their real talent, they can evolve up or down. But guys like Cobb, they can't really evolve up - they are already at the ceiling of how good a player can realistically be. They can only really go down. Inevitably the true megastars seem to disappoint, outside of a few that manage to keep up with their actual selves. [Note: this really only applies to hitters, I will describe pitcher evolution sometime later.]
So Cobb had the advantage of being awesome, but the "disadvantage" of only being able to get worse. And he got worse for sure. But he had another advantage - youth. Cobb arrives at age 18. So while he may not have been nearly as good as the real Cobb, he was still good enough, and got into the league so young, that he had lots of time to accumulate value. And so he did, enough to be the all-time league leader in hits despite barely hitting .300 for his career. Hank Aaron was similar in a lot of ways.
I don't mean to disparage him - he was a genuine slugger for his era, and he was definitely a superior hitter in his early days, in the heart of the deadball era. But he was more of an accumulator of stats than a generational superstar. He was more Paul Molitor than Mickey Mantle.