Missing Ballplayers

The purpose of the Biographical Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is to compile complete and accurate demographic information (date and place of birth, date and place of death, full name, height, weight, hand batted and thrown with) for each of the nearly 17,000 men who have played major league baseball.  The part of this project that particularly fascinates me is trying to find "missing" major league ballplayers -- those whose date and place of death are unknown.  We don't actually send out search parties to look for them, since most of the "missing" players played in the nineteenth or early twentieth century and can safely be assumed to have been dead for many decades at least.  But what I and other interested members try to use clues from contemporary newspapers, census records, city directories, and a wide variety of other genealogical records to try to determine what happened to these enigmatic men.

It's an odd pursuit to be sure, but I find it fascinating.  When we find a missing player, sometimes it just adds a date and place of death to the encyclopedias.  But on many occasions, it tells us something important about baseball history.  The longer I've done this research, the more aware I've become that it's often no coincidence that a player ends up "missing."  Baseball, like any other commercial activity, has stressed the stories of its most marketable players.  So finding the players who drop off the radar is an important way of ensuring that baseball history includes all its contributors, not just the ones who fit certain preconceived notions.

One of my books, Level Playing Fields, came directly out of just such a hunt, as did many of the biographies that I've written for the BioProject and the discovery that William Edward White was the first African-American major leaguer.  When I became involved in the project in the early 1990s, we had over 500 "missing" players and we've now whittled it down to less than 300.  We'll never find all of them, but we're never going to stop trying either.  Fortunately, new resources are springing up on the internet all the time and they often enable us to solve a longstanding mystery.

To learn more about some of the players about whom we know a great deal but who have still eluded our best efforts to find them, click here.

To read about players who we've probably found but have been able to find definitive proof, click here.

To learn more about some of the other players we're pursuing, click here.

And you can follow these links to read descriptions of the lucky breaks that enabled us to find some long-missing players:

    Peter Morris
    Harvey Watkins
    John Fogarty
    Alfred Nichols
    Ed Ford
    Joe Gannon

For more on our research on other demographic information on ballplayers, click here.