Quote:
Originally Posted by Veltman26
The first words of this post are "Unless the primary ID is mistaken" - and there's absolutely no reason to believe that the primary ID is correct. I'm not at all convinced that the baserunner is Merkle; it looks more like another 1908 Giants rookie named Buck Herzog, which would explain why Conlon didn't bother to identify him. And Chance is holding the baserunner on, which would make perfect sense if it's not the Merkle game. Where is the evidence that Conlon was photographing this famous game? Not in the photo, that's for sure. Everything that follows from this extraordinarily shaky assumption falls apart immediately if it's a regular season game.
This alleged discovery is a textbook example of "confirmation bias" - the tendency to search for, interpret, and favor new evidence in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. I agree that it would be extremely cool if this were indeed Fred Merkle, but unfortunately, all of our overheated fantasies can't be true!
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While I wouldn't say that there is "no reason" to believe that the player is Merkle, I have been very skeptical since the photo was posted. Merkle had a very youthful face in 1908, unlike the baserunner in the photo. I've posted his Carl Horner portrait below.
A photo of Herzog from 1908 in the Chicago Daily News archives (on the left, below) does look similar to the player in the Chance photo, though the angle is not exactly the same and the resolution is poor. I think it's fair to discuss whether the baserunner is Herzog rather than Merkle: