List of Major League Baseball players with unidentified given names
Forty-one individuals who played professional baseball at the major league level lack identified given names. Identification of players remains difficult due to a lack of information; a Brooklyn, New York directory, for instance, lists more than 30 men that could be the professional player "Stoddard". Possible mistakes in reading box scores from the 19th century could have also led to players without given names: "Eland", for example, could be another player from the Baltimore Marylands roster whose name was simply misread. Four of the 41, McBride, Stafford, Sterling, and Sweigert, were local players added to the Philadelphia Athletics team by manager Bill Sharsig for Philadelphia's last game of the season against the Syracuse Stars on October 12, 1890. Sterling pitched five innings for the Athletics and conceded 12 runs. McBride, Philadelphia's center fielder, and Stafford, the team's right fielder, both failed to reach base, but left fielder Sweigert reached base on a walk and stole a base. Society for American Baseball Research writer Bill Carle "doubt[s] we will ever be able to identify them".