Tagged: Photo Identification

January 17, 2013

Photo Nerdgasm: UPDATED

I know, I know, Morse trade, WBC, Manti Te’o’s Invisible Girlfriend…I have something important to discuss here: Who are these guys? These are two shots taken at the Yankees’ old spring training facility at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the 1978-85 range. The negatives were never printed and never identified by the photographer, and they aren’t obvious to anybody. And I speak as an anybody whose proudest moment was going into the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Photo Archive three years ago and having the privilege to be shown their “unidentified” file – and to reel off seven or eight consecutive IDs in the first photos I saw. I was just beginning to draw a crowd when the muse left me. I think I had one tentative name guess for the remaining hundred in the pile.

Anyway, all we know is that they were Yankees, that we think they were non-roster invitees, and that we have three meh possibilities. Want to play?

Who are these guys?

Who Am I, Number One?

Who Am I, Number Two?

As I said, there are a couple of possibilities. Number One looks vaguely – very vaguely – like Keith Smith, who played exactly 20 innings at short for the Yankees in ’84 and ’85. Let’s look at Number One and Smith, side by side…

I AM P. Keith Smith

Am I P. Keith Smith?

Face shape looks pretty good. The eyebrows are close and any deviation can be attributed to a common eyebrow issue for us Keiths – trimming. The head tilt as part of the attitude toward the camera is one of those subtle things that often tell you more than facial features. But maybe you recognize him and it’s somebody else?

As to the other, I’m not nearly as confident:

I’m Brian Fisher

I’m Kelly Scott

Kelly Scott? Brian Fisher?

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if our Mysterious Yankee #2 is neither Kelly Scott – a pitcher who was in camp several times in the ’80s – nor Brian Fisher, a very highly rated reliever the Yankees had gotten from Atlanta and later peddled to Pittsburgh. There are a few bad color photos of Scott in which his hair looks very much like our guy. The similarities to Fisher are obvious – the mouth, ear shape, etc. – but doesn’t the unidentified Yankee look significantly older than Fisher? It’s not like these photos could’ve been years apart: Fisher was in the Yank camp just two years, ’85 and ’86.

In any event, if you want to play sleuth, feel free to use the comments. If you have photos or links to support your thoughts, lemme know. Thanks!

UPDATE: One of your kind comments reminds me that we have a few clues besides the faces of the unknown Yanks. Over #2’s right shoulder, for instance, is a very familiar figure.

The Number 7 is on the one and only Mickey Mantle, who served as a Yankee spring training instructor from the year after his retirement until his health failed in the ’90s – with a couple of exceptions. Mantle was barred from baseball in February, 1983, for having gone to work for an Atlantic City casino, and wasn’t reinstated until March, 1985. Therefore you wouldn’t see a Yankee spring training photo from 1983, 1984, or a shot from early spring training 1985 (most of the fringe guys would’ve been long gone before Mantle’s earliest possible return, on March 18th).

This dates the photo to 1982 or earlier, and 1986 or later. The negatives were supposed to have originated from the late ’70s or early ’80s.

Just as importantly, you can plainly see the memorial armband on Mantle’s left sleeve. The Yankees wore those a lot, and would’ve had them during spring training in 1980 (for the late Thurman Munson), in 1981 (for the late Elston Howard), and in 1986 (for the late Roger Maris).

The images were shot on the same day – they’re on the same negative strip. So they are likely dated to 1980-81 (a smaller chance that they date to 1986). Although then, as now, minor leaguers occasionally would be seen in big league camp even if they weren’t on the roster and they weren’t formally ‘non-roster invitees,’ their likelihood of being photographed was very small (they could and were photographed separately, in minor league camp).

Thus the field of who these two men could be really shrinks to all the guys in Spring Training for the Yankees in 1980 and 1981 who I don’t recognize on sight (and in those two seasons I went from Radio Network sportscaster and reporter, and part-time photographer, to CNN sports correspondent). And that field is:

1980: Pitchers Jim Lewis, Brian Ryder, and Jamie Werly; catchers Scott Benedict, Pat Callahan, and Dan Plante.

1981: Pitchers Curt Kauffman, Lewis, and Ryder; catchers Callahan and Kevin Shannon.

For the record there a couple of other obscure guys in the field that I’ve eliminated because they don’t look like either of these guys: pitchers Paul Boris, Greg Cochran, Tom Filer, Roger Slagle, and Chris Welsh (that’s right: that Chris Welsh, now the Reds’ announcer and then a Yankee lefthand pitching prospect). Speaking of the Reds, neither is either of them another 1981 non-roster invitee named Don Gullett, who was still – five seasons later – trying to spend one healthy season in a New York uniform after having signed a huge free agent contract in the winter of 1976-77.

But I’m digressing. Let’s put together a rogue’s gallery of the remaining possibilities:

Jim Lewis, 1980

Jamie Werly, 1981

Brian Ryder, 1982

Curt Kaufman, 1982

Scott Benedict, 1981

Pat Callahan, 1979

As you see, it’s an incomplete gallery. Nothing turned up for two of those catchers – Dan Plante and Kevin Shannon.

I think most of these guys are obviously neither of our unidentified Yankees. One bears a remote resemblance – I’d suggest Scott Benedict, later a renowned high school coach in Florida, might just be Yankee #1, but the chest hair and the chin in the identified shot suggests otherwise. But do you see that shot of Brian Ryder with the then-Reds farm team, the Indianapolis Indians, from 1982. We may have a winner.

Let’s look at a couple more shots of Ryder, and put them alongside our Yankee #2:

Ryder, 1981

Ryder, 1980

Ryder?

I like the 1981 black and white especially – the profile shot – as a match, but it’s pointed out below that the complexion looks more like those two shots of Jamie Werly.

Ryder was the 26th overall pick in the 1978 draft and produced 15-victory seasons in his first two full years in the minors. But after a so-so year at AAA in 1981 the Yankees packaged him and another minor league pitcher named Fredie Toliver to the Reds, for Ken Griffey Sr (it is almost impossible to recall that we used to just call him “Ken Griffey.”) Ryder and Werly never made the majors – but the latter did put together a solid seven years in the

Jamie Werly

high minors, including a season as the top pitcher in the Southern League in 1981. In a recent photo he looks a lot like Yankee #1. I think it’s one of them, shown just a few springs ago, with Mickey Mantle over their shoulder…

If anybody has any ideas on the others, feel free to post a Comment – especially if you’ve got a shot of Dan Plante or Kevin Shannon.

UPDATED AGAIN!

Finally it struck me. “Number 1” here has been annoying me for awhile. Looked familiar, but in a disguised way. Is it possible I’m seeing a guy I knew with long, even bushy hair, and a mustache, without either?

Dennis Werth

Could I be…

Dennis Werth? Jayson Werth’s step-Dad?

December 24, 2009

George Michael – Baseball Historian – RIP

The prominent television sportscaster, perhaps the last “up-and-coming” Top 40 disc jockey at the height of the genre, and onetime NHL announcer, George Michael, passed away this morning in Washington after a two-year fight with leukemia. He was 70 years old.

Less known about George was that he, like so many people I’ve discussed here in the last few months, had a remarkably specific and utterly satisfying contribution to the game we love. Nellie King has been a fixture of Pittsburgh player, reporter, game announcer, and now author. With only 25 major league games under his belt, Dirk Hayhurst has probably written the best baseball book of the young century. Lester Rodney, who I memorialized here on Tuesday, was perhaps the only white journalist of the 1930’s and 1940’s who not only pointed out the unstated ban on black players but tirelessly advocated for its repudiation.

And now there’s George, who for all the eccentric devotion of his program “The Sports Machine” to rodeo, or (when it was hardly known to exist north of the Carolinas, NASCAR), was an ardent baseball researcher and historian. He had a general interest in vintage baseball game photography, but, like all of us, you could cut to the chase with him and quickly discover his exact, precise fascination with… slides into the plate or the bases.

It was George’s self-appointed duty to identify every participant in every such photograph, and the game depicted. He focused on the days before uniform numbers, when often you couldn’t see the runner’s face, the catcher’s back was turned to you, the uniforms were barely identifiable (if that), and even the stadiums were hard to pin down. He was published on the subject in a Society for American Baseball Research Journal a few years back, and his walk-through of his step-by-step process for finding clues was not only fascinating, but terrifically instructional to anybody trying to figure out the identities in any vintage baseball photography (when logos are not visible, you can most easily narrow down years and teams, even in black-and-white photos, by whether the caps and socks were dark, light, or striped; also don’t forget to judge where the throw originated – was it from an outfielder, or was it from the catcher? In the latter case you’re most likely dealing with a stolen base attempt – and probably a guy with a few steals under his belt).

I remember once getting a large package from George containing a series of photocopies of the top ten or twenty photos that were giving him the hardest time. Inevitably he had already found the era, at least one of the teams, possibly the ballpark. One, I believe, he had found to be from a 1911 A’s-Red Sox game, in Philadelphia, in the sixth inning. The third baseman was Home Run Baker but the runner tearing into third was problematic because the face was partially obscured and, incredibly, there had been two different plays made at third during the inning.

So if you think of George’s untimely passing this holiday season, remember that for all his larger-than-life tv persona, and the seemingly endless rodeo highlights — he was truly one of us, and his hobby underscored how otherwise diverse a crowd “we” are.