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John Fogarty

Often the quest for a missing ballplayer involves correcting an erroneous listing that made its way into the encyclopedias. This can be especially challenging, because nineteenth-century newspapers generally referred to ballplayers by their surnames only. A perfect example was a man named Fogarty who played two games in left field for the St. Louis Maroons of the National League in 1885.

At some point, these games were assigned to Joe Fogarty, the brother of a much-better known player named Jimmy Fogarty. Joe did play some baseball in his own right, but the idea that he was the St. Louis player made no sense, as Joe was only about 16 at the time and was still in San Francisco. Meanwhile, notes about the new St. Louis outfielder clearly identified him as a local amateur (e.g., St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 18, 1885, "To-morrow's Game. Fogarty, late of the St Gotthards will be tried at St Louis"; Sporting Life: "Fogarty, a local amateur"). But proving who the mystery player actually was was much more difficult, and took us many years to do.

The obvious candidate was a St. Louis player named John J. Fogarty who started playing professionally with Topeka in 1886 and had a lengthy minor league career. Since the Sporting News started in 1886 and was based in St. Louis there were plenty of notes about him, but none of them directly linked him to the man who played for the Maroons in 1885. But we had nothing else to go on, so we started working on the assumption that this minor leaguer was our major leaguer.

Two notes in the Sporting News in 1895 did state that Jack Fogarty has been retired from baseball since 1892 and acting as a deputy sheriff. This enabled us to pinpoint a John J. Fogarty in the city directories and trace him up until 1898. But his father died in 1894 and John moved out of the family home in 1898, and because of his common name we lost his trail.

Eventually new genealogical resources from St. Louis became available and we found death records for his mother and several siblings. The obituaries indicated that John was alive as late as 1918 and enabled us to narrow our search down to a few candidates. Painstaking checking of each one led us to a John J. Fogarty who died on February 21, 1918, and his death certificate proved that he was the man we'd been trying to find for so long.

Unfortunately, our work was still far from over. Remember how we had made the assumption that minor leaguer Jack Fogarty was the man who played two games in left field for the St. Louis Maroons? Now that we'd finally found minor leaguer Jack Fogarty, we still had to prove that he was also the Maroon player. That was still a daunting challenge and so the search again hung fire for several years.

And then suddenly one day it ended. I was looking through the Dallas Morning News and shortly before the 1888 season, it described the backgrounds of that year's players. Fogarty was one of the men and his profile began, "The popular left fielder for the team is known by the soubriquet of 'The Well,' because all flies that go into the left field are his. He don't miss them, and when a ball goes over his way a cry goes up -- 'fell in the well.' He was born May 24, 1864, in St. Louis, and was educated in that city. His first professional playing was with the St. Louis Maroons as left fielder in the fall of '85 .."

There was more to the article, but I stopped reading at that point and let out a cry of my own. Even the date of birth matched the death certificate that we'd tracked down! And so Joe Fogarty was removed from the official records and replaced by:

John J. "The Well" Fogarty
b. May 24, 1864 St. Louis
d. February 21, 1918 St. Louis