Zooming In On A Great Old Photo
This article was written by Mark Fimoff
This article was published in Summer 2009 Baseball Research Journal
This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game.
Wide-angle views of early baseball games provide an unending source of fascination and speculation: What ballpark? Which teams? What year? Can we identify any of the players? Of these, for obvious reasons, the last question is usually the most difficult one to answer.
Rarely, absent a highly credible contemporary source, is such a photo published with anything approaching definitive player IDs. When such claims are made, one wonders: How can you really know who the players are?
The wonderful photo below of the Chicago Cubs’ Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown pitching against the Brooklyn Dodgers in a 1912 game at Washington Park in Brooklyn appeared in Brooklyn Dodgers by Mark Rucker (2002).
Click on the image to read the rest of this article in its original pictorial layout:
PDF link to article: https://sabr.box.com/shared/static/z5dfmupr44638ujkih13hks78w6uam1y.pdf
MARK FIMOFF, an electronic engineer, is author of the “Mystery Photo” column in the SABR Pictorial History Committee Newsletter.