Thorn: Baseball’s newest major leaguer played in 1884, unearthed from obscurity
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on June 5, 2017, with mention of SABR members Pete Palmer, Bill Carle, and Peter Morris:
In an email of May 23 sent to Pete Palmer and myself, baseball historian and sleuth extraordinaire Peter Morris wrote: “Gentlemen, I have recently determined that part of the record credited to Taylor Shafer with Altoona in 1884 actually belongs to a different player, whose real name was Frank Schiffhauer, but who used Schaffer as a baseball name.”
Palmer concurred, replying: “Good work. ICI was fairly accurate, but they did mess up on a few players with similar names…. I see by my player file, that 1884 UA Alt-KC-Balt [statistics] were originally credited to Frank Shaffer (no bio info) by S.C. Thompson.”
When Morris shared with me the step-by-step process underlying his discovery, I suggested that readers of Our Game would definitely be interested. Here is his story.
Read the full article here: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/a-new-major-leaguer-d6a91ffba243
Originally published: June 5, 2017. Last Updated: June 5, 2017.