“They have records there on everyone who ever played in the majors, and cabinets full of minor-league records. “Well, we could be in Cooperstown, at the Baseball Hall of Fame, in just a few hours. He was just a substitute fielder for one inning.” A man who played one inning of baseball for the New York Giants during the 1905 season. “Only what you know - a baseball player who was patted on the head by a dream. “Do you know who Moonlight Graham is?” Jerry asks. Salinger (“Jerry”) and protagonist Ray Kinsella discuss the mysterious Graham:
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But, unlike the author of “Humor Among the Minors”, Archibald Wright Graham managed to crack the big leagues for a brief “cup of coffee.” Though virtually unknown for most of the 20th century, Graham later gained fame as a character in “Field of Dreams,” a movie based on the novel “Shoeless Joe” by W.P. Just who was this Graham? Like Ashenbach, he was a minor league ballplayer. He was very much pleased at his big day's work, and after the fourth time at bat he rushed wildly up to the press-box saying to the reporters, “Look here, boys, my name is not Wright today, it's Graham.” Four hits killed off the alias.
Out of four times up, he hit out a home run, two three-base-hits and a single. On another Sunday at Syracuse, Graham, alias Wright, had a glorious day at the bat. Lastly, as a nod to baseball fans, the name is recognizable. It is also a pun on social media: Moonlight (nightly) and Graham (Instagram). It was descriptive of his own creative act of moonlighting-these were created at night after working on his studio paintings or handyman jobs. He was quite a fighter while in the game and his aggressiveness once led him into a fracas on a bright Sunday at Scranton when he and the umpire indulged in a battle of fisticuffs in the middle of the diamond. The name Moonlight Graham reverberates with multiple meanings. Graham consented to this proposition and decided to play under the name of Wright. I could ill afford to lose his services on the Sabbath, as we usually played a double-header on that day, so I prevailed upon him to play under an assumed name. My club was then a contender for the championship, and the fight promised to be a close one. He had some scruples about playing Sunday baseball, his father having strictly forbidden him to play on the Sabbath. Unlike Grahams big-league career, however, Dedeauxs was actually two games, as he was a late-inning defensive replacement at short a day earlier, but never batted. Graham was not much of a batsman, but was chain lightning on the bases and in the outfield. 'My God, youre Moonlight Graham,' Robinson told him. On my champion Scranton club of 1906 I had a young outfielder that Manager McGraw of the Giants was kind enough to send on to me for further development. One story he recounts is titled “An Alias That Did Not Last Long.”
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One of the nearly 20,000 books in the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library is a volume published in 1911 and titled “Humor Among the Minors: True Tales from the Baseball Brush.” In the book, career minor leaguer-turned-author Eddie Ashenbach (sometimes misspelled “Ashenback”) reminisces about his two decades in professional baseball.
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