Thorn: Henry Moore, mystery man of baseball
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on July 20, 2015:
I have been thinking lately of one-year wonders, phenoms who blazed their names in the sky and then retreated into obscurity. We’ll look at pitchers another day, but in the history of Major League Baseball, only three men have batted .300 in their first full season and then never appeared in the big leagues again: Buzz Arlett, Irv Waldron and, most interestingly to me right now, Henry (sometimes rendered as “Harry” or “Hen”) Moore.
<snip>
Henry Moore hit .336 in with the Washington Nationals in 1884, leading the Union Association, a one-year major league, in hits and in games played. Yet, as David Nemec has written: “After a couple of years in the minors, he completely disappeared. As well as the record for the highest batting average of any player who appeared in the major leagues for only one full season, Moore left behind another unique legacy: He is the only .300 hitter about whom not a single biographical fact is known–where he was born, when he died, which way he batted and threw–none of it.”
I have taken that as a friendly challenge and proceeded to poke around a bit. What I can say with certainty is that he batted left, threw right, was born in California before 1865 and probably died there, certainly sometime after 1905 and before 1912. That is not very precise, I will be the first to admit; perhaps others will pick up loose strands from this ball of yarn and take the research further.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2015/07/21/henry-moore-mystery-man-of-baseball/
Originally published: July 22, 2015. Last Updated: July 22, 2015.