Stump found Cobb rather difficult to work with most of the time and totally impossible when drunk. Despite the troubles, Stump stuck it out mostly because he feared Cobb's reaction if he tried to leave. From the time the two spent together we now have two books and a movie, each of which offers a slightly different point of view of Cobb's life.

During a visit to the Cobb family mausoleum in December 1960, Cobb told Stump about the murder of his father, and pointed the finger at his mother. Cobb had used the mausoleum as an attempt to reunite his family members in death, disinterring some of them to do so.

The Stump autobiography came out a few months after Cobb's death. Despite Cobb's unpleasantness, the book (My Life in Baseball by Ty Cobb) painted Ty in a sympathetic light. Thirty years later, however, Stump extensively revised the book (Cobb: A Biography), including his own experience with Cobb and capturing the man who was so disliked by so many of his contemporaries. In 1994 the writing of the book was used as the basis for a film starring Tommy Lee Jones as Cobb and Robert Wuhl as Stump.

In 2010, an article by William R. "Ron" Cobb (no relation to Ty) in The National Pastime, official publication of the Society for American Baseball Research, accused Al Stump of extensive forgeries of Cobb-related documents and diaries and even 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.