A New Major Leaguer
Not called up from the minors last week, but unearthed from the obscurity of 1884 by baseball’s greatest detective
In an email of May 23 sent to Pete Palmer and myself, baseball historian and sleuth extraordinaire Peter Morris wrote: “Gentlemen, I have recently determined that part of the record credited to Taylor Shafer with Altoona in 1884 actually belongs to a different player, whose real name was Frank Schiffhauer, but who used Schaffer as a baseball name.” Palmer concurred, replying: “Good work. ICI was fairly accurate, but they did mess up on a few players with similar names…. I see by my player file, that 1884 UA Alt-KC-Balt [statistics] were originally credited to Frank Shaffer (no bio info) by S.C. Thompson.” When Morris shared with me the step-by-step process underlying his discovery, I suggested that readers of Our Game would definitely be interested. Here is his story:
The other day, the counter of Major League Baseball players on the front page of Baseball-Reference.com clicked past the 19,000 mark — quite an imposing number, especially if viewed without the benefit of context. Yet in many ways, this group remains an extraordinarily small and exclusive one. With Major League Baseball having been around for almost 150 years, on average only 129 new members per year have made the cut.
For most of that time, baseball stood preeminent as the national pastime, meaning that it was the rare American boy who didn’t dream of being a big league ballplayer. To be sure, in recent years other sports have captured the imagination of some of those youngsters. But with the U.S. population exceeding 300 million and the pool of hopefuls now encompassing much of the world, those 129 successful aspirants per year begins to look like a very small number indeed.
Another way to gain perspective is by considering the lengths to which candidates are willing to go to gain admission. Of all the tykes who go out for Little League or the equivalent, just a select few are ever offered a professional baseball contract, and only a small minority of that select group spend even a day as a big leaguer. Yet many continue to ride the buses from one minor league town to another for years in hopes that one day their number will be called. The crop of players who joined the select circle this year includes more than a few noteworthy examples.
Thirty-two-year-old Austin Bibens-Dirkx, for instance, made his debut with the Rangers on May 17 after twelve minor league seasons during which he twice had to restart his career in an independent league. Chris Bostick joined the select circle on May 8 although he was the 1,336th player selected in the 2011 MLB Draft. Dovydas Neverauskas and Gift Ngoepe also gained admission this year despite hailing from the baseball hotbeds of, respectively, Vilnius, Lithuania, and Polokwane, South Africa. And the name of jeweler Frank Schiffhauer was added to the roll seventy-eight years after he died in Detroit. Wait, what? Settle in and pull up a chair, for the twists and turns of this saga are going to take a bit of time to recount.
Nineteenth-century game accounts typically referred to players only by their surnames except when two teammates bore the same last name. As a result, when the first baseball encyclopedias were published in the 1950s, assigning first names to many of the earliest major leaguers was no easy task and many gaps or incorrect information resulted. Over the next few decades, a long list of diligent researchers and encyclopedia compilers, including Lee Allen, Pete Palmer, David Neft, Tom Shea, Joe Simenic, Bill Haber, John Thorn, Bob McConnell, and Richard Malatzky, searched through old newspapers, censuses, city directories, reserve lists, and other primary sources to gradually whittle the list of mystery players down to a more manageable size. While Allen was the Baseball Hall of Fame’s historian (1959–1969), these efforts were centered in Cooperstown, which still assigns an individual player file to each of the 19,000 major leaguers. Eventually, however, the torch was passed to the Society for American Baseball Research’s Biographical Committee, which has been ably chaired since 1989 by Bill Carle. It is this committee that supplies birth and death and other biographical information to such invaluable on-line resources as Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.
In recent years, research of this nature has been made much easier by the digitization of many of the sources that earlier generations had had to tediously thumb their way through. A series of clicks can be all it takes before an Internet browser reveals the solution to a longstanding mystery. In most cases the new information supplements what was previously known, but sometimes it corrects an earlier mistake, and once in a long while it uncovers a previously unknown major leaguer whose record had been buried inside that of another player. That was what happened recently as a result of my research on a player with the surname of Shaffer who in 1884 had played for three teams — Altoona, Kansas City, and Baltimore — in an upstart major league called the Union Association.
In one of the earliest encyclopedias, this player had been identified as Frank Shaffer. But years of digging by many determined baseball detectives failed to turn up anything about him except for a few tantalizing clues that seemingly led nowhere — one note said he hailed from Detroit and another that he was from Cincinnati, but no strong candidate could be identified in either city. Then in 2001, researcher Harold Dellinger came across new information showing that the Kansas City part of the record in fact belonged to a player named Taylor Shafer. When more investigation proved that Taylor Shafer had also played for Altoona and Baltimore, Frank Shaffer’s name was removed from the list of major leaguers.
Recently, however, I happened on a couple of notes that put that conclusion in doubt, so I decided to revisit the question. Taylor Shafer was credited with playing nineteen games for Altoona between April 24 and May 30, but before long I had overwhelming evidence that he did not join the team until the first week of May. A note in the Detroit Free Press on March 6 reported that local players Frank Shaffer and Jerry Moore had signed with Altoona, and a follow-up piece on April 1 reaffirmed that the Altoona player was a Detroiter. A weekly sporting periodical called Sporting Life had a correspondent who covered the Altoona team and after the February 13 issue stated that “Frank Shaffer of Detroit” would play for Altoona; there were additional references on February 27 and March 13 that also gave the player’s first name as Frank. Then in the May 14 issue, in a column dated May 7, Frank Shaffer’s release was announced. A note published that same day in the Missouri Republican confirmed that “George Shaffer’s [sic] brother [Taylor] has joined the Altoona nine. … The Altoonas have released Cleary Cross … [and] Shaffer, a Cincinnati [sic] player.” So Frank Shaffer had to have played at least five games for Altoona before he was released to make room for the unrelated Taylor Shafer, a coincidence that had denied him his rightful place in the record books. When I reported all of this information to Bill Carle, he agreed that a change was in order.
Wanting to make sure I had checked every available source, I kept digging and found that the 1884 Altoona city directory had a listing for Frank Shaffer, occupation ball player, boarding at the Central Hotel along with Moore and several other Altoona players. Better still, on February 7 the Altoona Tribune published a profile that read as follows: “Frank Schaffer [sic], who will play on third base, comes from the Detroit [sic], though he first played with [Germany] Smith in the Jenning’s [sic] of Pittsburgh. He is five feet eleven inches in length [sic] and weighs 160. He is a diamond setter by trade.” At last, I had some legitimate clues that might make it possible to identify this mystery player!
Turning next to the city directories, I found the name of “Frank Schafer, jeweler, A Schaub, bds [boards] 91 Farmer” in the 1883 Detroit CD. Then in the Pittsburgh city directories, I located an 1881 listing for “Frank Shaffer, jeweler,” at 231 Centre, and one for “Frank Schafer, jeweler,” two years later at the same address. Frank was nowhere to be found in 1884, but in his place was an “Adam Schaffer, saloon” at 231 Centre. So it looked as though a Frank Schafer with the same occupation as the ballplayer had moved from Pittsburgh to Detroit in 1883, just as stated in the Altoona Tribune’s sketch. Even the fact that this man was absent from the 1884 directories for both cities corresponded to the ballplayer’s appearance in that year’s Altoona directory. But could I confirm that the Detroit jeweler and the Pittsburgh jeweler were the same man?
By good fortune, the 1880 census listed a Schaffer family at 231 Centre in Pittsburgh and it included Frank, age 21, occupation jeweler. In another encouraging development, Frank was one of at least eleven children of Raymond and Theresa Schaffer. Such a large family, I figured, would be easy to trace, but in this it turned out that I was sadly mistaken. I located the family in Pittsburgh on the 1870 census — where Frank was listed as Francis Shaffer, age 9 — but they seemed to have disappeared entirely in the mid-1880s. Frank did not reappear in Detroit after the 1883 listing and his family apparently vanished from Pittsburgh.
At least I still had that 231 Centre address, so I used the search function available on several genealogical websites and found a Schiffhauer family living there in the years after the Schaffers apparently left town. I noticed immediately, however, that the first names of a lot of the Schiffhauers were matches, so I checked the census and, sure enough, the two families were one and the same! Presumably the family switched to Schaffer because they were tired of having the name Schiffhauer mispronounced and misspelled, but eventually decided to readopt the family name. Another perusal of the Detroit city directories revealed that a Frank or Francis Schiffhauer, occupation jeweler, showed up a few years after that lone listing of Frank Shaffer and stayed there for many years. All of the difficult work was now over, and before long I discovered a death certificate for a Francis X. Schiffhauer, occupation jeweler, who had been born in Pittsburgh in 1859 to Raymond and Theresa Schiffhauer and who died in 1939 at a hospital outside of Detroit.
Francis X. Schiffhauer
Born December 6, 1859 Pittsburgh
Died March 18, 1939 Eloise, Michigan
Frank Schiffhauer’s name will thus join those of Bibens-Dirkx, Bostick, Neverauskas and Ngoepe among the additions made this year to listings of the now more than 19,000 major leaguers. The membership perks he can expect will include his very own player file at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and a page of his own on such websites as Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet. As for the statistics that will appear alongside his name, they will not be all that impressive. The estimable Pete Palmer disentangled Frank’s five games from those of Taylor Shafer for me, and they show only three hits in nineteen at-bats (.158), one run scored, and two errors in twelve fielding chances for an .833 fielding percentage. Becoming a member of such a select circle is, however, distinction enough to make anyone very proud.
