It's certainly possible that you've stumbled onto some sort of bug. If he (or someone with the same name
) is showing up in the box scores, then that player should have stats. Other people are more knowledgeable about this than I am, but my understanding is that if you unretire someone, he is going to show up as a free agent first. Then you can go into the Editor, and assign him to a team. Is that what happened when you tried to do this with Ernie? Or did you just assign him to a team without him being a FA first?
Just tossing out some thoughts here.