In the past I have made the case (here and here, and in my edition of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide) that deadball era pitcher Walter Ball was mistakenly credited with a nickname, “The Georgia Rabbit,” and given the wrong full name—George Walter Ball—as a result of a pair of punctuation errors, twenty years apart, in two quotations from Sol White. Briefly put, Walter Thomas Ball was accidentally combined with a different pitcher, previously unknown to researchers: George Washington, a.k.a. the Georgia Rabbit, who pitched for the Cuban X-Giants and Philadelphia Giants, and who collapsed and died of cardiac arrest before a Philadelphia Giants game in Connecticut in 1908.
The other day I ran across a this 1919 item from Cary B. Lewis’s column “Around the Diamond” (Chicago Defender, March 1, 1919). It’s one of the earlier versions in print of the familiar story about a young John Henry Lloyd repurposing a wire basket as a catcher’s mask.
I had certainly seen this item before, but hadn’t remembered that, when he was hit by the two foul tips that swelled both his eyes shut, Lloyd was catching none other than “the famous twirler ‘Georgia Rabbit’.”
This story has them playing for the Macon Stars in 1907. My guess is that it probably took place a couple of years earlier, as in 1907 Lloyd was with the Cuban X-Giants and Washington was with the Philadelphia Giants. Lloyd joined the X-Giants in July of 1906—interestingly, Washington had pitched for them earlier that same year, in May, though as far as I can tell they didn’t play for the X-Giants at the same time.
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