Where did you come from?

Baseball Reference and Stats Crew both have a "Grimm" listed as having played for the Beavers in 1926 and 1930, but as far as I can tell, no "Grimm" saw any action with the Beavers during that time, or any other for that matter (there was Bob Grim, but he came along much later).

I have gone through every single available (which is almost all of them) Beavers box score for '26 and '30, and not once is there a "Grimm" mentioned. In fact, the only other baseball "Grimm" that is even mentioned on the same newspaper pages during those two years is, Charlie Grimm, then of the Chicago Cubs.

I briefly thought that somebody might've gotten confused while reading the recaps of the two Beavers-Cubs exhibition games that took place in 1930, and added Charlie to the Beavers for these sites by mistake, as he did appear in those two games. But the teams didn't play in '26, so that possible explanation doesn't hold much water.

It's a tad frustrating to know that I haven't gotten a response to either of the emails I've sent to Baseball Reference in recent months regarding other corrections, both of which were backed by solid research (and links to blog posts), nor have any changes been made; and yet somebody else was apparently just able to add a random name willy-nilly to the site, with seemingly no additional information needed to justify the addition.

I spent a couple of hours, and clicked on hundreds of pages in search of this "Grimm", and found absolutely nothing. So, unless proven otherwise, I'm just going to go ahead and say with near certainty that at no point was there a "Grimm" playing for the Portland Beavers in 1926 or 1930.

One Gilbert became two

Baseball reference currently has an unknown "Gilbert" listed as having pitched for the Beavers during the 1921 and 1922 seasons.

The Stats Crew also has an unknown "Gilbert" listed on the rosters for 1921 and 1922, and while they don't implicitly say that it's the same guy, it's easy, especially when combining it with the scant information from Baseball-Reference, for one to assume that it would be. So, with very little to start with, and no one saying anything to the contrary, I went into the research for this attempted identification looking for one "Gilbert", and ended up identifying two; one Gilbert for 1921, and one Gilbert for 1922. 

Let's begin with the 1921 Gilbert...

The San Francisco Examiner 7/25/21

The first mention of "1921 Gilbert" appears on the 25th of July, 1921, recapping his previous days' debut in the second game of a doubleheader with the Seals (both were losses for the good guys). The Oregon papers were more straightforward with their stories, but I've included this clip from the Examiner's pithy wrap-up (one can expect nothing less from the Examiner), if only because it provided the first clue in attempting to identify this Gilbert, namely that he might have been a bit on the older side. It isn't much, but it's something.

Our Gilbert didn't fare so well in his first outing, at least not on the mound, giving up 3 runs (including a HR), and issuing 3 walks in 4 innings of work. He fared a bit better with the stick though, collecting two hits and driving in a run during his two appearances at the plate.

Our next clue(s) comes from the following day:

The Oregon Daily Journal 7/26/21

Finding out that he was once in the Three-I League helped quite a bit. The part about him "attempting to stage a comeback" was useful as well, as it implies that he had either been injured, or that he might've been past his prime. Given the comments from the Examiner's beat writer, and this mention of a comeback, I put all of my eggs in the possibly "past his prime" basket. I know next to nothing about the Three-I League, but switched gears at this point and started looking for him on the team rosters from the previous couple of years of this league; which yielded bupkus, a whole heaping plate of it! So, back to my comfort zone I went, that being the PCL.

The final clue, the lynchpin if you will, in identifying this Gilbert shows up just two days after the previous article:

The Oregon Daily Journal 7/28/21

R.W. Gilbert!!! Huzzah! Initials make all the difference in the world when trying to identify an unknown person from over a hundred years ago. R.W. Gilbert becomes Rufus Wellington Gilbert, who did indeed pitch in the Three-I League some years earlier. Prior to his stint with the Beavers, Mr. Gilbert's last go in the minors had occurred five years previously with Terre Haute of the Central League, who he was also managing at the time.

The Richmond Item 11/30/20

Rufus Gilbert was 36 years old at the time of his attempted comeback, which explains all of the allusions to his age. Unfortunately for him, the one inning of work he got on July 25th, would be his second, and last, game with the Beavers; issuing a walk, and striking out in his only at bat in the team's 17-7 loss to Vernon (Tigers). It appears that this was also his last appearance in baseball, at any level. Why this comeback was attempted, and how it came to be with Portland, when he had never played further west than Denver is unknown, and at this point will likely remain forever unknown. I'd like to think that I might revisit him later on down the line and do a more well-researched piece on him, but I have so many other guys to cover on here that it'll probably be left for someone else to write a more in-depth piece on him. Hopefully someone who knows more about the Midwestern leagues.

Moving on to the second "Gilbert", aka "The 1922 Gilbert".

The Oregon Daily Journal 9/11/22

The 1922 Gilbert was considerably easier to identify, it took all of two minutes, at best to do so. Somebody else should've done this by now.

From what I can gather, the Goshen Giants were an amateur team out of tiny Goshen, OR, and Carl Gilbert was their star pitcher at the time. Given the size of the town at the time, and the fact that there's an article in one of the papers about them seeking out opponents, I hesitate to refer to them as a barnstorming team, but it appears that they didn't mind traveling to find competition. Like seemingly everything else, the Goshen team is in need of some serious research. This however is a blog about the Beavers, so back to the beavers, and young Carl Gilbert; who by the by, would see his first action just one day after signing with the team.

The Oregon Daily Journal 9/12/22

In four innings of work, Carl gave up two runs on four hits, and hit a double in his only at bat in the teams 7-3 loss against the Angels. On an unrelated note, Oregon was in the midst of a heat wave during September of '22. The game time temperature for this one in Portland was 93°.

This article about Carl's first outing appeared the following day:

Morning Register 9/13/22

Three out of four scoreless innings isn't too bad for someone who had never pitched minor league ball at any level before.

Morning Register 9/14/22

Management seems to have been intrigued by Carl's lone appearance that season. This would his one and only game with Portland.

Stockton Evening and Sunday Record 2/14/23

He made it to Spring Training, and made the Spring Training roster...

The Fresno Bee 2/24/22

... but wasn't on the roster once the season got under way, and as of right now, there's no mention of him being released in any of the papers available online. He shows back up with the Goshen team later in '23, and then the trail goes mostly cold. There's mention of a Mrs. Carl Gilbert in Eugene in '33, and another article from Eugene about Carl working with the Boy Scouts in '42, but that seems to be a about it. One can only speculate in an instance like this, but I can't help but wonder if he suffered an injury of some sort in '23 or '24, one that was severe enough to knock him out of baseball. It does seem rather odd that a pitcher who showed some promise in his one minor league would never end up playing in another league again.

I wasn't expecting this mysterious "Gilbert" to turn into two separate Gilbert's, but I guess that's the way it goes sometimes, or at least that's the way that it went this time. Both Gilbert's have been added to the all-time list, and with this name out of the way, the list of unknown players is now down to 21.

The all-time list is finally done!

This blog hasn't worked out quite as well as I had hoped, or at least as of this writing it hasn't. Producing mini biographies is considerably more difficult than I thought it would be (taking some writing courses way back when probably would've helped with this). I envisioned doing at least a few posts a month, but have only managed a handful over the last year or so. I have about a dozen unfinished drafts though; that counts for something, right?

I'm hoping things will pick up around here at some point, but on the off chance that they don't, I wanted to at least do one thing to make this blog stand out from any other similar sites; that being to finish my already more complete than any other sites list of all-time Beavers players. And I'm happy to say that I've finally done it.

I've been going at it pretty hard for the last four weeks, but I think that the effort was well worth it, as I now have a list of every known Portland Beaver, ever! The only downside is that all of this research has added a few more names to my list of unidentified players, which as of a few days ago was at 23. I have identified one more as of this writing though (post coming soon), so now it's down to 22. These names will be added to the overall list as they're identified, or probably in some cases, not identified. 

I'm not sure how many names are on the all-time list, but I noticed a while back that my old list seemed to be testing the limits of how much data one can store on a Blogger page, as it was slowing down all of my devices every time I attempted to add another name. With this in mind, I did have to break up the list in to two pages, A-L, and M-Z. It's not ideal, but it'll do for the time being.

I realize that there will only be a finite amount of people who will ever be interested in such a list, but if you just so happen to be one of those people, you can check out A-L here, and M-Z here. Of course you can always just click on the tabs that are underneath the blog's header too. I'd like to make those stand out a little more, but haven't figured out how to do it yet. I will though.

It took considerably longer to finish than I had imagined, but it's done, and now I can focus a bit more on those mysterious final 22 guys that no one currently has any real information on.