Cracking Baseball’s Cold Cases

This book is the result of one man’s twenty-year quest to solve some of baseball’s most enduring mysteries—the “cold cases” of major leaguers about whom virtually nothing is known. (In many instances, the various baseball encyclopedias list only their names and one other word: “deceased.”) Some of these mysterious players had negligible professional careers and their time on a major league diamond was more the result of good fortune than anything else; others were stars in their day and then vanished.
The Biographical Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research is committed to finding them and award-winning researcher Peter Morris tells the story of some of the most remarkable of the searches that resulted, many of which featured twists so surprising no mystery writer could have invented them.

Baseball historian Peter Morris is a two-time winner of the Seymour Medal for best baseball book of the year and was an inaugural winner of the Henry Chadwick Award for lifetime achievement in baseball research. He lives in Haslett, Michigan.

Peter Morris
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 208
Bibliographic Info: notes, index
Copyright Date: 2013
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7545-2
eISBN: 978-1-4766-0331-5
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
1—Walter Walker 3
2—Seymour Studley 11
3—Tom Carey 18
4—Eddie Kolb 28
5—Louis Phelan 43
6—Abbie Johnson 53
7—Bert Miller 63
8—Arthur Sunday 73
9—Wally Goldsmith 79
10—Al Nichols 87
11—Patrick Murphy 99
12—Harvey Watkins 107
13—“I’ve Been Right Here This Whole Time” 120
14—The Shafer Brothers 123
15—Peter Morris 131
16—George Bristow 140
17—Early Bloodhound Techniques 147
18—Ed Clark 159
19—Joe Gannon 173
Afterword 179
Chapter Notes 181
Index 191