Mystery quiz: help ID somebody else's old baseball pics
 

We've nothing to do with this other than that we really enjoy sleuthing out (or seeing someone else sleuth out) the pertinent facts of old photos
(and really hate unsolved mysteries and when somebody comes to a sports forum asking for help with that sort of thing
and then doesn't co-operate or even respond despite scads of help offered).

A vendor showed up about a week ago on the eBay Sports Cards & Memorabilia forum asking for ID help on four old baseball pics
(glass plates, as it turns out), seen here:
http://community.ebay.com/t5/Sports-...4314#U21014314

We haven't gotten very far (or really anywhere) with them, and through the vendor's apparent lack of interest, that eBay thread has idled
and is sliding down towards page 2. Our best wild shot in the dark on the fourth photo is Red McKee, at Hilltop Park, 1913, Joe Smith catching
(our second best guess is Colonel Mustard, in the parlor, with a wrench).
The third photo looks to be a Cleveland player, also from 1913 and at the same ballpark.
Any help, boys? Players, years, stadia?

Working on other stuff at the moment, but just so that folks don't have to flip over to eBay (which I didn't even realize had a Sports Cards & Memorabilia forum), here are the images they posted:

http://community.ebay.com/t5/image/s...v=mpbl-1&px=-1

http://community.ebay.com/t5/image/s...v=mpbl-1&px=-1

http://community.ebay.com/t5/image/s...v=mpbl-1&px=-1

http://community.ebay.com/t5/image/s...v=mpbl-1&px=-1

Have at 'em, boys!

The 3rd photo is Cleveland player Joe Birmingham,

4th photo looks like Detroit Tigers player Red McKee.

Here's where #1 and #2 are from

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collecti...1685/resource/

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collecti...1701/resource/

Don, thanks very much for your work on these!
Birmingham -- excellent. Looks like a match to us.
McKee? Can't be -- we said McKee, and we're never right! ;)
And we were wrong about Hilltop Park -- Yankees' last season there was 1912 -- so we're still curious as to what singular-looking
1913 stadium it might be that's seen in both those last two pictures.

Most interesting find regarding the first two pics -- the eBay vendor's are allegedly glass plates, so, knowing next to nothing
about that aspect of early photography, we're confused as to how they could be in the LoC and also in the vendor's hands.
Aren't glass plates one-of-a-kind?

Still hoping others will chime in with player and stadia IDs...

You're welcome Butch. Red McKee from LOC.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collecti...1932/resource/

The stadium in the last photos is Griffith stadium in Washington D. C.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/640...0/845/o7qx.jpg

I read through the eBay vendor's comments in that thread, and my guess is that he's either mistaken or doesn't know what he's talking about (perhaps a bit of both). 3/4 of the original glass plates are in the LoC, and have been since 1955, so there is no possible way that the guy's grandfather has the actual original glass plate negatives. It's possible that his gramps has prints made from the original negatives, likely by way of the large digital images that the LoC has posted on their website. There are probably a dozen eBay sellers who would sell you something similar, with varying results depending on their printing method, but all coming from the same scans of the originals. If that's the case, then I would guess that the guy is using terminology or phrasing that sounds accurate to him, but because he is inexperienced with photography, conveys a different (impossible) scenario than he intended. Another possibility would be that gramps actually has some glass plate negatives, and seeing these prints in his collection, the gentleman wrongly assumed they were made from the negatives he saw. If that's the case, the original negatives may prove far more interesting than the modern prints.

Mind you there's a lot of conjecture in either scenario, but as you surmised, unless gramps looted the LoC archives, you can rest assured that the original negatives remain there.

Kudos to Don for hunting down IDs for 4/4 of them, and bonus points for finding the originals! :eek:

Don and Lance, thanks very much! Excellent information.

Still looking for player / team / year / ballpark IDs on the first two pics, though -- the LoC listings provide no details (that we see) beyond "1913-1917."
We're thinking the guy in the first pic is wearing an A's sweater...

For the third, then, it's Joe Birmingham, Cleveland, 1913, at Griffith Stadium.
For the fourth, Red McKee, Detroit, 1913, at Griffith Stadium -- could that be Rip Williams catching?
There's no resemblance to Henry, Ainsmith, or Ryan, the only other guys behind the plate that year for Washington.

Lance, we added a follow-up post in the thread at the eBay forum, asking the vendor for clarification on the source of the photos.

The first 2 photos are Washington Senators at University of Virginia at Charlottesville, Virginia for Spring training, don't know the players names.
Right on with photo 3 and four but don't know who the catcher is in photo four.

If the first 2 photos are from 1913 then here's a list of players that were to be at Spring training for Washington in 1913. from a newspaper dated 2-23-1913. So the 2 players could be from this list.

Don, superb work, thanks again! -- and sorry, we could've saved you some time and trouble if we ourselves had just
dug a little deeper at the LoC site and seen the additional views there of the UV field and Senator sweaters.

It'll take a bit more work to photo-match the first two guys, but that list is a huge help, and we're so close to having
every last bit of information on these pics we'll take a stab at it later on...

You're welcome Butch and good luck.

Thought I would pass this along to you for future reference. Spring training sites since 1901 for the American and National League teams. Also at the bottom of the page are the training sites for the Federal League.

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/team...sites-al.shtml

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/team...sites-nl.shtml

Only six of the 39 players were married. I wonder if that was typical for professional baseball teams of that era...

First photo is of catcher Julius "Dutch" Munch

More great work, Don -- thanks! There's no mistaking that schnozz.

By the way, Lance, odd timing regarding the eBay Sports Cards & Memorabilia board -- as of this week, eBay is restructuring all their forums,
eliminating a huge number of them and putting the rest into gigantic catch-all categories. So now, if you want to ask for or provide information
on something like this, or cards, or a game-used catcher's mask, you'll have to dig through a thousand posts on English bone china,
comic books, and Moppet paintings.
Also, those forums, long all but unmoderated and very well self-policed by the regulars there, are now subject to draconian "editing" (butchery)
by non-English-speaking eBay moderators. Our own comments (critical but polite, and but a handful among thousands critical of the new policy)
have been "disappeared." It's a shame, as the Sports Cards board was a terrific venue (we're not the only Net54 members who are/were regulars there).

Ugh. There went that. I'm probably for the better not having another forum to frequent obsessively though ;)

I also found this interesting of the 1913 Washington team. The players measurements for uniforms and caps .

The first 2 photos (players in Washington uniforms) are from the Ewing and Harris collection at LoC. I was part of a SABR project a few years ago to ID them. We identified about 215 baseball photos. These two were among the ones we could not identify. Thanks to Don for the Munch ID.