Friday, September 30, 2022

There's no Koene, but there was a Keene

Baseball Reference and Stats Crew both have a "Koene" listed as having played for the Beavers during the 1921 season...


... but as is often the case on these sites when you find a 'last name' only listing that has no stats attributed to it, there seemingly never was a "Koene". 

As per usual, I spent way too much time looking for this "Koene", if only to satisfy myself that he never existed. There aren't any typos that can be blamed for this one, so I don't know where "he" came from, or how "he" came to be on these sites.

The closest name to "Koene" that had any association with the Beavers in 1921 is Keene, Roy Keene.

Corvallis Gazette-Times 6/14/21
Roy Keene is a curious subject when looking into Beavers history. His Sporting News player contract card says that he was with Portland in May of '21...

... and yet, there's absolutely nothing else out there that mentions him ever having officially joined the team; or even traveling with the team. And unless I missed something, he doesn't appear in any of the box scores from May of that year either. It's certainly strange, those contract cards are not wrong very often, but there's something amiss here, and I can't seem to figure out what it is.

In some ways it's a bit of a moot point though, as much like our subject from the previous post, Roy's passion belonged to something other than playing ball. 

Statesman Journal 8/26/77
Ultimately, I can't say for certain that someone adding information to the above mentioned sites confused Roy Keene for the "Koene" that is listed, but since no "Koene" played for Portland in 1921, or any other year for that matter, I'm not sure how else one could explain this particular error.