Lou Proctor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lou Proctor is an example of a "phantom ballplayer," an American baseball player listed in the baseball encyclopedias by mistake. Over two dozen "phantoms" have been expunged from baseball's official record book Total Baseball and its predecessor, The Baseball Encyclopedia.
Proctor was not a baseball player at all, but supposedly a telegraph operator in Cleveland who inserted his own name into a Boston Red Sox box score on 13 May 1912, walking once as a pinch hitter for the St. Louis Browns. Research in the mid-1980s, however, revealed that the at-bat actually belonged to a real St. Louis player named Pete Compton (whose real first name was, of all things, Anna). Whether Proctor ever really existed (even as a prankish telegraph operator) is unknown.
Other phantoms include:
- "Edward L. Thayer," who supposedly played one game for the New York Mutuals in 1876. The player was actually named George T. Fair; whoever came up with Fair's pseudonym may have been thinking of Ernest Thayer, who wrote the famous baseball poem Casey at the Bat.
- "Turbot," (which is also the name of a fish), who was once listed as playing one game for St. Louis in 1902. In his anthology This Great Game, author Roger Angell listed him on his All-Time Fish Names Team and bemoaned the fact Turbot had been dropped from the encyclopedia. "I don't know what happened to him, but we need him [in] the outfield."
