If you haven’t seen it already, Brent Moulton has posted a painstaking statistical study of Carlos Morán over at the Hall of Merit, concluding that he was similar to Stan Hack in career value among major league third basemen. I’ve been meaning to put together some posts specifically on Morán for a while—actually, ever since this blog started; but, well, I haven’t gotten to it yet. In the meantime, you can find some musings on Morán’s throwing hand buried in this rambling post, with a little more in this one. Morán is supposed to have thrown left-handed, and I’ve been trying to confirm it in contemporary sources—with no success so far.
I won’t list everything here, but in the “cuban statistics” category you can find Morán’s statistics in three seasons of regular Cuban League play, in three seasons of the Premio de Verano (Cuban Summer League), and in all exhibition series against visiting Negro League teams from 1904 through 1915. And here you can find Carlos Morán’s totals (and those of a number of other hitters) against major league teams visiting Cuba.
Also, the 1914 Fe photo I posted the other day (courtesy of David Skinner) shows a somewhat dejected-looking Morán (gloveless, naturally).
Brent was having some difficulty posting a link to a photo montage of some players for the 1911 Habana club, including Morán. Here’s the photo itself, from the Library of Congress site (I assume, since it dates from 1911, there are no copyright issues), which, incidentally, includes another view of Luis Padrón:
UPDATE 5/13/2007 David Skinner sent this note:
The 1911 Habana photo is from the 1911 Spalding Baseball Guide Spanish-American Edition, later called the Cuban Edition. I queried Spalding (now owned by Russell and of course long out of the publishing business) about using photos from the Cuban guides in my book. It is out of copyright and Spalding recognizes it as historical material which can be used freely. Dan Touhey, Spalding VP for Marketing, understandably is protective of the
still-active brand name. He informed me that Spalding would consider my use of and crediting of the photos to be positive promotion for the brand.
I forgot to say: Lloyd was often called "Sam Lloyd" in Cuba at this time--I have no idea why.
Posted by: Gary Ashwill | February 21, 2008 at 09:49 PM
Great find, Brent!
On Castillo: I've seen some later photos in the Cuban press that show him carrying more weight--also one, I think circa 1911 or 1912, that shows him sporting an Afro (!), believe it or not.
Posted by: Gary Ashwill | February 21, 2008 at 03:48 PM
While looking for something else, I finally ran across a reference to Morán throwing left handed in this article from The New York Times, December 18, 1910, about the Detroit Tigers series that had just concluded. The article was written by Hall-of-Fame umpire Billy Evans and was one of a series of articles published by the Times that winter about baseball in Cuba. (To read other articles in the series, go the nytimes.com site and type in the Search box: "billy evans" cuba baseball; then select NYT Archive 1851-1980.) This article also includes an interesting description of Julián Castillo as the Cecil Fielder of the deadball era. It would be interesting to see a contemporary photo of him; there's no way that he weighed 260-285 pounds when the picture was taken that appears on page 85 of Figueredo.
Another question -- both the Times article and the photo above use the name "Sam Lloyd" for John H. Lloyd - does anyone know what that's about?
Posted by: Brent | February 20, 2008 at 09:08 PM