This player's story (innovator, early Canadian import, 13-year veteran, led a double life of bigamy, apparently jumped to his death from a boat headed from New York to Boston) and his card (1887 Kalamazoo Bats Cigarettes, as impressive a set as was made before 1900) are both worthy of presentation here.
But this is really just an excuse to link to Baseball Hall of Fame Researcher Tom Shieber's startling blog which narrows down to a span of 48 hours - nearly 118 years ago -
when this photograph was taken. In the process, Shieber proves that the image on this and maybe other Kalamazoo Bats cards was altered as surely as Topps airbrushed its pictures in the '70s and everybody photoshops theirs today.
If you like baseball photographs (I'm guessing this is the subject we are unanimous on) you will love Shieber's detective work.
He also inadvertently gives several clues as to why the year(s) of issue for this series has been so fluid. Between Shieber pinpointing the fact that one of the more common of the Kalamazoo cards issued in 1887 wasn't even photographed until August 22 or 23 of that year, and the recent discovery of an ad in a York, Pennsylvania newspaper for the cards in
November of that year, we can now guess these were issued at the end of the 1886 and 1887 seasons, and in the off-seasons, and maybe during the year!
Here's the link to the extraordinary (and creatively presented) blog:
Baseball Researcher: Arthur Irwin and Kalamazoo Bats
The sliding player is Al Maul (debut 1884) who despite doubling as a pitcher and an outfielder appeared in only 410 games over 15 seasons with eight different teams!