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Other Demographic Information While most of the research I do for the
Biographical Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research involves
looking for missing ballplayers, the committee's mission 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.
Collecting accurate information in
each of these categories can be more challenging than might be imagined.
Height and weight seem relatively straightforward, but researchers have to rely
on the information that appeared in the contemporary newspapers and a baffling
range of heights and weights were often reported. The uncertainty is
increased by the reality that the weights of players could fluctuate
dramatically during the course of his career. Throwing hand is
straightforward enough if one is lucky enough to find a specific reference
(although there are odd exceptions, such as the case of John Roach, described on
my home page). Batting hand can be far trickier. In
the late nineteenth century, there were a lot of players who experimented with
switch-hitting for brief periods or for several years, and it is far from easy
to decide whether to list such players as switch-hitters.
A player’s complete real name is
another piece of information that sounds easy to collect but can be very
problematic. In the nineteenth century, the spelling of surnames just wasn’t as
standardized as is the case nowadays. Part of this can probably be attributed
to prejudice; the spellings of the surnames of Irish-Americans and immigrants
from non-English speaking countries were often treated with apparent contempt.
In addition, many people were illiterate and others simply don’t appear to have
cared much. As a result, a player’s name might be misspelled throughout
his career without him ever raising an objection. Hall of Famer Mickey Welch
was known by that name throughout his career, yet his tombstone reveals his
correct surname to have been Walsh.
Given names were also viewed as far
less immutable than is the case today. Sometimes they were changed or reversed
at christening or at other times, and rarely was a name change a formal
procedure. Even surnames were sometimes changed, especially ethnic ones that
were difficult for Americans to spell and pronounce. My favorite example is of
a player known as “Bunny” Brief. The family’s original name was Grzeszkowski or
Grzeszkowiak or something like that – I documented over a dozen different
spellings that were used at one time or another. According to family legend,
the new surname came at a citizenship hearing when the judge asked the
ballplayer’s father to spell his surname. Around the second “z” the judge said
“make it brief,” the clerk wrote “Brief” in the official records and that became
the family surname.
Dates and places
of birth are even more troublesome. Of course if a researcher is lucky enough to
find a birth certificate, then that settles things. Unfortunately, birth
certificates weren’t
required in many locales for much of the nineteenth century, and even when they
were required, they often weren’t
filed. And in the absence of a birth certificate, exact birth information
becomes very different to pin down. The problem isn’t
not being able to find any birth information but not being able to trust what
one finds -- ballplayers’
livelihoods depended on staying young so most would shave a year or two off
their age. Some would later claim clean and admit to their true age, but
ballplayers (like all of us) like to think of themselves as forever young and
their reporting of their ages reflects this ways. There is contradictory
evidence on the year of birth of many, many players and no definitive way to
resolve such contradictions. Official documents like death certificates, social
security records and military registration are probably the most reliable, but
are far from infallible. So we do our best to resolve the many discrepancies in
birth information, but it is a very inexact science.
One that I was able to resolve to my satisfaction was Fred Beebe’s
date of birth. And yet I’m
still skeptical of his listed place of birth. Click
here to read about my research on him, which shows how difficult this type
of research can be. As you can tell if you looked at the page on Beebe, the
ages for adults that appear on censuses are especially unreliable. But
they are much more reliable in the case of children; ages are rarely off by more
than a year or two on children under ten. Birth order is also almost
always correct. So that brings us to Satchel Paige. Click
here to read about his real age (but be prepared
for a surprise!) |
