[prewinter]

Originally Posted by Cusick

By "phantom," I mean they were on major league teams during either the regular season and/or playoffs, but never played in a regular season (or playoffs) major league game. So they were not really major leaguers. Sometimes these players are known as members of the Bill Sharman Society, named after the Basketball HOFer who was with the Brooklyn Dodgers in September of 1951. Keith Olbermann coined that term.

There is a list of known such players on the SABR website in its Research Tools section under the Heading "Near Major Leaguers."

I'm going to piggy-back off of this discussion of phantom players to inquire about James E. Dallas (dallas001jam), not quite a phantom player. James Dallas got a tryout with the Philadelphia Quakers in the spring of 1887, and played in at least one game with the club in Savannah in late March before he was released. I was looking to see if he by any chance appeared in a team photo of the club prior to his release, and I came across this photo of the 1887 club:
http://www.19cbaseball.com/image-phi...lies-1887.html

One of the players in the back row is explicitly unidentified, and I'm pretty sure there aren't enough players identified to cover all the players in the photo. So does anyone know the history of this photo, and have all of the players been identified?