The Mystery Continues: Maxmeyer

The Beavers wrapped up their 1932 season with a seven-game series against Seattle. Portland won 6 of those seven outings, only losing the second game of the final days doubleheader.

The Fresno Bee 10/3/32

During their last game, a pitcher by the name of "Maxmeyer" came in for a couple of innings of relief work, giving up eight runs and taking the loss in Portland's eventual 12-9 defeat. Maxmeyer would never pitch for the Beavers again.

The 1932 season wasn't just any season for the Beavers, it was a pennant winning season; their first in 18 years. Portland finished five games ahead of Hollywood, and while they had technically secured the the title a couple of days before, the felicitations didn't come until after the final game had been played. Because of the long drought in-between pennants, most of the article that ran in the days followings papers, focused on their winning season, with only minor mention of that last doubleheader. Maxmeyer wasn't mentioned in the games brief recap, but did appear in every single papers box score, so I don't think that he's another Grogan. Maxmeyer existed, it's just that no one ever bothered to mention his first name.

                         

He is listed on both Baseball Reference and Stats Crew, by last name only, of course. 

The two sites differ on the length of his outing, but provide very little other information that one can use to try and track him down. Maxmeyer not being a very common last name, one would think that it wouldn't be very hard to identify this fellow, problem is, it doesn't appear that there were any other Maxmeyer's playing ball in or around '32. I've triple checked all of the newspapers sources, and no results were produced, at least none in regards to this matter. Wondering if his name may have been misspelled, I tried some searches using the traditional German spelling of his name, Maxmeier, which also yielded no results. Max-Meyer drew a blank as well. Max Meyer, as a full name, was a longshot, but I had to try; nothing on that front either.

I had planned on ending this post here, but before wrapping it up, I decided to look through some of my yet to be researched, non-Beavers, Portland baseball files. This yielded an interesting, albeit very distant possible solution to this mystery.

San Francisco Call 3/14/12

Richard Maxmeyer pitched for the Beavers farm team, the Portland Colts, of the then Northwestern League, during the 1911 season, and came back for a couple of games in 1912 before being released in April of that year. Where he was before and after that, I could not say. I've yet to find any mention of him before or after his stint with the Colts. Given that there doesn't appear to have been any other pitching Maxmeyer's, could this be the same Maxmeyer from that last game in 1932? If he were only in his late teens during his time with the Colts, it's entirely possible that the same fellow could've come back twenty years later and thrown for a couple of innings. Why he would be doing so is completely different matter. It could've been for a favor, or as a thanks for past services rendered to the organization, who knows? Heck, with so much time in-between, the '32 Maxmeyer could've even been the 1911/12 Maxmeyer's son. Or it could just be two completely unrelated Maxmeyer's -- although as uncommon of a last name as this was, I find this last option a bit harder to get behind.

This mystery will have to remain for the time being, but I don't think we'll have to wait too long for an answer, as this one feels very solvable.