Phantom Ballplayer - Phantoms Who Never Were

Phantoms Who Never Were

• Edward L. Thayer supposedly played one game for the New York Mutuals in 1876; the player was actually named George Fair. (19th and early 20th century players sometimes played under assumed names in an attempt to circumvent contractual obligations with another club.) Whoever came up with Fair's pseudonym may have been thinking of Ernest Thayer, who wrote the baseball poem Casey at the Bat.
• Turbot (which is also the name of a fish) was once listed as playing one game for St. Louis in 1902. In his anthology This Great Game, author Roger Angell listed him on his All-Time Fish Names Team and bemoaned the fact Turbot had been dropped from the encyclopedia. ("I don't know what happened to him, but we need him in the outfield.")
• A catcher named Dienens (no first name given) was listed in early baseball encyclopedias as having played one game for the 1914 Chicago Chi-Feds of the Federal League. Later research showed that the game was actually caught by the Chi-Feds regular second-string catcher Clem Clemens -- historians reading a handwritten scorecard of the game had incorrectly deciphered "Clemens" as "Dienens".
• Lou Proctor was listed as playing one game for the 1912 St. Louis Browns, drawing a walk in his only plate appearance. Research in the 1980s, however, revealed that the at-bat actually belonged to the Browns' Pete Compton. According to legend, Proctor was actually a Western Union operator who inserted his name into the box score as a prank. However, whether Proctor actually existed—even as a prankish telegraph operator—is unknown.