I don't see why we have to assume that Barker, Brooks, or Carter would have known the truth, assuming that Corson did make up the stuff about going to spring training with the Yankees. How were they going to check something like that back in the 1950s? The only baseball encyclopedia available was the crappy Turkin-Thompson one, which only gave year-by-year batting averages or win-loss records for major league players, and was riddled with errors in any case. These guys would have probably had to travel to Florida and spend days looking through microfilms of old newspapers, and what reason would they have to go to all that trouble? Corson mentioned the Yankee stuff in one article he wrote for the Sport Hobbyist in September 1956, and then very briefly in passing at the end of an article in the April-May 1957 Sport Hobbyist; it's not like his whole identity as a collector was based on that.
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