ROYSTON, Ga. - While gazing at one of the exhibits in the Ty Cobb Museum, a visitor overhears a discussion about the many sides of the Georgia Peach. A dirty player or a fierce competitor? A despicable racist or a generous philanthropist?

The visitor jumps into the debate with someone from a different sport, a different time, but the analogy seems to work.

"He's like Dale Earnhardt," said Ralph Nix, who stopped by the museum while in this northeast Georgia town on business. "Half the people cheered him. Half the people booed him. That's just the way it is when you're that good."

Cobb was THAT good - no argument there. And 100 years to the day that he made his major league debut - appropriately enough, with a double in his first at-bat for the Detroit Tigers - the true measure of the man is still being debated.

"He had dichotomies in his personality," said Dan Holmes, who runs the Baseball Hall of Fame Web site and wrote a book, "Cobb, Baseball's Greatest Hitter" that came out last year. "He could be very rude and vicious. On the other hand, he was a Southern gentleman. He was a letter writer. He wrote a lot of letters with wonderful, gracious form to teammates, opponents and friends he made in life."

On Aug. 30, 1905, Cobb stepped to the plate for the first time in the majors after a three-day-long train trip from Georgia to Detroit, a baby-faced teenager thrust into a rough-and-tumble world with men who played hard and lived harder.

He quickly showed he could hold his own.

The first game was against the New York Highlanders - known today as the Yankees. The 18-year-old Cobb played center field and batted fifth. In the bottom half of the first, he came up against Jack Chesbro, whose 41 wins the previous season is still the modern record. There was a runner at third and two outs.

"Chesbro was one of the best pitchers in the game at that time," Holmes said. "He was known for his spitball. Cobb took the first pitch. Then he hit next pitch into the left-center gap."

According to other versions of that historic game, Cobb actually fell behind in the count 0-2. No matter - everyone agrees that the first of his more than 4,000 career hits came in that first at-bat.

Cobb would go on to become one of the greatest hitters in baseball history, with a lifetime average of .367 that still ranks as a magical figure in a sport that relishes its numerical heritage.

But Cobb's legacy goes beyond his accomplishments on the field. He is remembered as a dirty player who sharpened his spikes; a Jim Crow racist who had several ugly run-ins with blacks; and a quick-tempered, violent man who fought with fans, opponents and teammates.

"He's almost become a cartoon character," Holmes said. "He's viewed as the most evil villain in baseball history."

Cobb's supporters - such as Holmes and those who run the museum in the tiny town where he grew up and was buried after his death in 1961 - say there's more to the man. Much more.

"Ty Cobb was not all a bad fellow," said Julie Ridgway, the museum curator who named a son Ty and is a distant relative of Cobb through marriage. "Sure, he had his quirks. But he didn't care if people knew his quirks. He just went on and did his thing."

The Ty Cobb Museum doesn't gloss over his faults, which is evident from the sign that adorns the entrance to the small shrine.

"No player in history," it says, "generated more emotion, created more havoc, bruised more egos and left more bitterness than Tyrus Raymond Cobb, a snarling wildcat who cut a bloody path to baseball immortality."

But the museum also has displays on his generosity, which included sizable donations to start the Ty Cobb Healthcare System (which now includes three hospitals, three long-term care facilities and one assisted-living complex) and the Ty Cobb Educational Foundation (which doles out some $600,000 a year in scholarships to students both black and white).

Ernie Harwell, the longtime radio voice of the Detroit Tigers, had his first meeting with the "Georgia Peach" shortly after starting his career in Atlanta in the early 1940s. The long-retired Cobb was coming to Royston for a visit, and the brash young broadcaster dropped in thinking it would make a good interview.

"My bosses said, 'He's a mean, old man. He's not going to talk to a kid like you who's just starting out,'" Harwell remembered. "But he was very warm, very hospitable. I sat in the living room with him and we talked for about 15 minutes on the air. He filled the whole program, then we sat around and talked a lot more."

Cobb made it to the majors during a tumultuous time in his life. Less than month earlier, his father had been shot and killed in the family home by Cobb's mother, a sordid tale of alleged infidelity a jury later ruled was a tragic accident.

The Tigers purchased Cobb from the South Atlantic League's Augusta Tourists for a mere $750. He played in the final 41 games of the season for the injury-depleted Tigers, batting a modest .240. It would be the only time in his career his average dipped below .320.

Cobb held close to 100 records when he retired after the 1928 season and was one of the first five players elected to the Hall of Fame, receiving more votes than anyone (yep, even more than fellow inductee Babe Ruth).

Many of the records have fallen - most notably, Pete Rose breaking the mark of 4,191 hits - and some historians claim Cobb's stats from the dead-ball era don't hold up quite as well to latter-day scrutiny.

Still, there's no denying that the scrawny kid with the fiery eyes who first batted a century ago was one of the best to play the game.

No matter his faults.