Quote:
Originally Posted by botn
Mark,
What do you think about what Mike Nola says? Were you able to use the scan I provided to make any kind of determination on the sliding player?
|
I've had excellent correspondence with Mike Nola* several times and he is an expert on JJ. He helped me un-authenticate an item Heritage had mis-labeled (that was based on an erased date). I don't know specifically what his skills are in facial ID. I don't doubt that he feels certain about this image.
In my view, though your scan is a bit better - there still isn't nearly enough their for certainty. If I was advising an author looking for a JJ sliding photo for his book, I would tell him to find another. If the card was in a Library of Congress collection labeled as Lord and Tannehill, I would tell them to leave it that way. If an authenticator asked me if he should authenticate the image as JJ - I would say not.
If you study the subject, you will see an inherent bias against certainty that 2 faces are the same person when you really can't see one of them very well. That's because the mind has a tendency to fill in what you can't see - and not always correctly.
This is a lot more blurry than any image I have ever seen anyone try to seriously identify. I can point to a couple of barely discernable features that seem to be very similar to JJ, and as has been said, it
can be JJ. That's where I would leave it unless the photo is found.
* edited to add:
Mike won't remember, but back when I was first getting interested in this stuff I disagreed with an ID of Syd Smith in the Addie Joss day panorama on Mike's site because the player was clearly shorter than Smith's SABR listed height of 5'10". On this Mike was right (Syd was really about 5'5"-5'6") and I have since learned to distrust the early ballplayer height listings. The SABR bio committee chair still refuses to change Smith's height listing.
