Who is this mystery pitcher?
(Bigger Mystery: If this is a picture of the guy’s grip, form, and release point, will the ball even make it to home plate?”)
Thank you again Robert (and we presume, Daryl) Blair for once more presenting The Pecan Park Eagle with a perplexing question of baseball identity.
“Who am I?” this pitcher picture screams – waiting for an answer that may never come. Why? Because he simply doesn’t look very much like a famous baseball person – nor the kind of guy who would have had the grit to play the game long enough to have his photo taken for the forever grateful sight of posterity. To me, he looks more like the guy from a small town amateur club who sprang the bill for his club’s uniforms, just to make sure that his own image was included was included when they went down to the photographer’s studio early one Saturday morning before a noon game out at the county fairgrounds.
Let’s make it easier by ruling out just about every famous big league picture from Old Hoss Radbourn of the 19th century glove-using era to Nolan Ryan or Roger Clemens of more recent times. Old Hoss had a really fine mustache and never played organized ball with a team that sported an ornate “M” or “Mo” on the heart-side jersey pate. Nolie and Roger never dressed out in this uniform style and neither of them ever flashed a pitching form, ball grip, or release point that looked anything like what our mystery guy is about to dramatically release to some off-screen phantom batter. – They may have tried using a guy with a bat in his hand to help the mystery man look real in his actions here, but that guy may have been forced to retire from the studio for a drink at the local saloon to cure his case of uncontrollable laughter from the experience.
Oh well, now that we’ve finished this unfair and fairly ruthless ripping of the ancient mystery man, but all in good fun, who do you think the guy is? And please, Mystery Man, forgive us for having fun at your defenseless expense. We realize you’ve been gone a while, but some things down here haven’t changed much since your departure. Sometimes the mind gets really bored with photos and presentations that looked really staged – even if it’s a guy from at least century ago trying to look like he’s throwing a baseball.
Happy late week trails to you, investigative mystery man identification team!
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Thursday, February 12, 2015: 9:00 AM
Holy Moley! – Robert Blair just sent me an unsolicited clue that gave the whole mystery away, alright.
First, the clue from Blair: “Played with the Chicago Cubs for most of his career and shared something in common with Roger Metzger.”
Holy American Disabilities Act! – The guy in the old photo above – the guy with the terrible grip, delivery, and form – the guy that at least two of us – (See Bill Hickman’s take in the Comment Section that we placed there from E-Mail) – well, we thought that either this apparent nobody or his parents paid for this studio shot. – We’ve now learned that this image actually turns out to be an early photo of Hall of Fame Chicago Cubs great right handed pitcher, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown!
Mordecai Brown lost a finger on his right from a childhood accident. Roger Metzger, who also played briefly with the Cubs much later, lost the tips of four fingers from a power saw injury in 1979.
You may want to check out the career stats of Mordecai Brown, whose early photo above made a few of us think of him as nothing more than a great pretender dweeb. – A “dweeb” he was not. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1949. Here’s his record at Baseball Reference.com:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/brownmo01.shtml
We still don’t now what uniform he was wearing in the early picture, but the following picture from Brown’s Cubs days shows that his grip and delivery form didn’t seem to keep him from winning 239 MLB regular season games.
Our apologies, Mordecai Brown!
Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown
Baseball Hall of Fame
1949
UPON FURTHER REVIEW …. It new evidence says this man cannot be Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown!
Thursday, February 12, 2015: 1:30 PM
Thanks to Greg Lucas and others who have written since this morning, especially to point out the finger loss discrepancies. I did a close-up crop on the throwing hand in the mystery pitcher photo. Then I also compared it to a multiple view visual of Brown’s right hand. Brown lost his his right index finger in a vegetable shredder at age 7. The much older than ag 7 fellow in the mystery photo still has his right index finger. That much is distinguishable in the blurry close-up – and, unless my eyes are deceiving me – that much alone is enough to conclude that the guy in the studio photo is NOT Mordecai Brown, no matter how he facially resembles a baby-fat younger version of the great Cubs star.
What follows are the blurry close-up of the studio pitcher’s hand, followed by the three-view shot of Brown’s actual hand. Draw your own new or revised conclusions.
This is fun, isn’t it? – The Pecan Park Eagle.
Close-Up of Mystery Pitcher’s
Right Hand.
Mordecai Brown
Three Views of His Right Hand
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 