cuatro ojos

A note about one player identification in the 1914 Lincoln Stars series. Jorge Figueredo, probably following Riley and Clark/Lester, has the Stars’ second baseman Clark identified as “Dell Clark.”

Now, Clark of the Lincoln Stars had a distinguishing feature.  He wore eyeglasses.  This was quite unusual at the time; the first major league position player to wear glasses (a few pitchers preceded him) was Specs Toporcer, who wouldn’t begin his career until 1921. 

We know Clark sported eyeglasses because the sportswriter for La Lucha who put together the batter-by-batter accounts of nine of the Stars’ games in Havana mentioned it all the time.  He calls Clark “el de las gafitas,” “he of the little glasses” (La Lucha, 10-13); “el hombre de las gafas blancas,” or “the guy with the white [?] glasses” (10-19); “el de los espejuelos,” or “he of the glasses” (10-26); and (mysteriously), “el de los espejuelos de Mahoma,” or “he of Mohammed’s eyeglasses” (10-16).*  According to La Lucha, “Clark se serenó con espejuelos y todo;” that is, he struck out, glasses and all (10-23).  Later in the same game, he again fanned despite “sus cuatro ojos” (his four eyes—evidently a universal expression).   They just wouldn’t shut up about his damn glasses.

Anyway, Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia has little to say about Dell Clark, placing him with the Lincoln Giants in 1914 and 1919, the St. Louis Giants in 1921, and the Washington Potomacs in 1923.  But in the next column on the same page, we find Morten “Specs” Clark.  Mortie Clark played for the Brooklyn Royal Giants in 1914, then for the Indianapolis ABCs from 1915 to 1921.  And the first line of his entry calls him “one of the first black ballplayers to wear glasses.”

Unless there were two bespectacled black infielders in New York named Clark in 1914, I’d say it’s pretty certain that the one who went to Cuba with the Lincoln Stars that fall was Morten.  (There’s also a good chance that Clark of the Brooklyn Royal Giants and Clark of the Lincoln Giants were one and the same, though you’d have to examine those teams’ box scores to make sure.)

*I found a single reference online to this phrase, in a novel by the nineteenth-century Spanish writer Cecilia Böhl de Faber, and I still can’t make out what it means—possibly some kind of proverbial expression, quite likely derogatory.

UPDATE 10/2:  David Skinner writes in with the following:

    Gary,
         As a former optical lab manager, I can't help with Mohammed's
    spectacles, but I'm pretty sure I know what white glasses are. It seems that
    Mr. Clark wore his specs in a silver-colored frame. When we ordered metal
    frames back in the day, they were either YGF (yellow gold-filled) if they
    were gold color or WGF (white gold-filled) if silver color, hence white
    glasses, or gafas blancas. Of course, it's been many years since metal
    frames were gold filled, now they're steel or titanium or some kind of base
    metal, so the terminology is I'm sure no longer used.

Now--if only someone could fill us in on los espejuelos de Mahoma...

Comments

[PoloRoam]

Wow- I just stumbled into this article today (2018) so apparently it took me 12 years to get here! I feel a little like Roy Hobbs...

If it's still of interest, the phrase "espejuelos de Mahoma" is a phrase that was common in the Caribbean in the XIX century, originally from the Northeast of Spain. This comes from the game of 'Quina'- basically a form of Bingo where the person that oversees the game doesn't call out the numbers, instead he uses play on words to slow down the players and make them think what's the number being called (or trip them altogether). So in Quina, number 88 is known as "Mohammed's glasses" because if you take the numbers and turn them horizontally they look like glasses; two 8's are said to represent Mohammed because of the way he looked at the world, almost with an infinite viewpoint (don't ask me, I'm not Muslim). That's how the phrase got co-opted in street parlance to say that someone wears glasses.

Also- you are right about four eyes being a common phrase as well- just as the above, it's another way of saying someone wears glasses since he has 'four-eyes' (2 of his own plus the 2 from the glasses). As you can see, Spanish uses a lot of phrases to make the language colorful (no pun intended).

Hope this helps!