Help Identifying circa 1910 N.Y. Giants Photo
 

As I've recently learned, some of the Florida hotels in the 1900's-1910's used to hire off-season major league players to play exhibition games on behalf of the hotel, as a means of drawing more tourists in.

The panoramic photograph below is one such team. It is believed to be the Seabreeze Hotel in the Daytona Beach/Ormond Beach area, circa 1910. Thus far in the photo, we believe we have identified the following (left to right):

1. Doc Crandall
2.
3. George "Admiral" Schlei
4.
5.
6. Hooks Wiltse
7.
8. Bugs Raymond
9.
10.
11. Beals Becker

We are looking to Net54 for a little help in confirming these players, and seeing if anyone can identify anyone else. The photo should be clickable to take you to photobucket where you can enlarge and zoom in. Thank you so much for your help!

Sincerely,

Mark Anderson
Heritage Auctions

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...psd582a11d.jpg

Doc Crandall was only 5'10" and the guy in the photo looks bigger.I don't think it
looks like him.
Number 3 doesn't look like Admiral Schlei #5 looks closer to him.

6 Doesn't look like Hooks Wiltse, plus he was 6' tall.

these are just my take on the names. Could use better look at the faces.

Maybe it is just me, but I don't see Bugs on there.

What other evidence do you have other than the palm trees and the S on their jersey to link them to the team you are claiming? And even if they were the Seabreeze team, are there newspaper articles tying these players to this team?

Is there writing on the back, stamps, other photos of this team?

This seems like a bit of a leap of faith. Especially for an auction house.

I'm sorry if I offended anyone, but as I pointed out in the original post, I was just giving what information was found so far and stated that "we believe" the photo to be the Seabreeze team with NY Giants members. The source of that information is a longtime photograph collector who had good knowledge of these hotel teams, as some of the teams were integrated and he was a collector of African-American baseball items from this time period.

The purpose for putting it up here on Net54 was to get the opinions of a lot more experts on this board. I have always been impressed with fellow Net54 members' abilities to match players in vintage photographs. If it is not as the original research purports, then we would not post it as such in auction. A "leap of faith" would have been putting this in an auction without garnering the opinions of Net54 members first. On the contrary, we are going out of our way to try to figure this one out before selling it.

Sincerely,
Mark Anderson

Maybe Devlin is number 10?

Mark, I don't think you offended anyone; however, it raised some eyebrows that you were able to identify this many NY Giants in a photo where none probably exist. It's great that you asked us for help, but it's odd that no one at Heritage could look at that photo and simply say "no". It's even stranger that this seems to be a trend in the industry - we recently saw Amos Rusie and Joe Jackson identified incorrectly in photos by an auction house. Why not just pay a consultant to check out your photos in-house?

none of those guys are Giants . I look more like Hooks Wiltse then that guy does (and just as handsome!)