Anatomy of a Photo ID: Tinkers to Evers to Garbark
I actually spent about three hours last night trying to come up with a name for this player. It's a great photo and that punim had to belong to somebody. According to the Dressed to the Nines website this would be the 1938 home uniform so the next step was to go to Baseball Reference dot com to look up the '38 Cubs roster. Then it was a process of elimination. It obviously was not a lot of the guys like Tony Lazzeri or Charley Root or Dizzy Dean, but some of the guys like O'Dea and French and Marty I needed to look up to see what they looked like. Despite umpteen Google searches and a very long perusal of the marvelous The Game That Was: The George Brace Baseball Photo Collection (whence much of the three hours) I was unable to find decent photos of some of the guys including Garbark. Next step was to thumb through the '90's Conlon Collection cards, all 1320 of them, and I found Garbark's mug. The whole time I had the spectre of bmarlowe hovering in my head with notions of earlobes and philtra and pupil distance per fortnight so I tried to be careful to qualify my conclusions. Garbark's ears and nose look about right to me; I have a problem with his eyes, specifically his lower lids, and with his jaw, Jimmy's picture looks more square-jawed than my card. There is the tendency to make the facts fit the desired outcome; I still am not convinced it is indeed Garbark. By elimination of the 1938 Cubs roster he is the only one left standing but I am not 100% certain that it couldn't have been a '37 player or even some guy up for a cup of coffee on the way to the Three-I League. I am waiting for someone to weigh in with more certainty that it is Garbark. The Brace family might have other photos, perhaps even some of the Burkes, which would nail it down better. Anyway, I got to look at a lot of baseball pictures in the course of my sleuthing (the Brace book has some fantastic photos, and not just ballplayers but their wives and fans and hot dog vendors etc; highly recommended) so it was lotsa fun.
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