A Baseball Roster: The-All Geology and Paleontology Team

This post has little to do with natural history.

Bluebirds have returned and are scoping out bird boxes.  Buds are brushing color onto trees.  Some days are actually warm.  Memories of a brutally cold winter have faded.  Clearly, it's time for baseball.  For this post, I was largely inspired by my recent discovery of an intimate and quirky publication imbued with all things baseball, the Elysian Fields Quarterly (EFQ).

The EFQ began life in 1981 as The Minneapolis Review of Baseball:  A Journal of Writing on Baseball (MRB), segued into the EFQ, and died in 2008.  For its owners and editors, it was (mostly?) a labor of love (apparently making money didn’t factor into it).  They worked to produce a journal that would be, according to Ken LaZebnik, who conceived of MRB:

a quasi-literary quarterly that would provide a forum for baseball fans everywhere, from any walk of life, to express their interest in and abiding affection for the National Pastime.

Macalester College holds a nearly complete run of both publications and a vast array of other associated material.  The LaZebnik quotation above is taken from the historical note in the Macalester College Archives guide to the Elysian Fields Quarterly/ Minneapolis Review of Baseball collection.  This quotation was originally posted on the EFQ website, a site which is no more. 

I am more familiar with the EFQ, though I think much of what I have to say about it also applies to MRB.  The EFQ embraced baseball, but, more importantly, it was devoted to publishing writing about baseball in all, or nearly all, possible forms:  history, fiction, essays, poetry, puzzles, interviews, book reviews, quizzes, statistical analyses, and so on.  Among the EFQ regular offerings was a column titled Rosters.  It's this last "literary" form that is the focus of this post.  (I would note that baseball-related photography and art were also part of the journal's reach.)

The Rosters column was a clever and playful deep dive into the names of major league baseball players.  The objective for this feature was finding enough players with names (mostly last names) that reflect some chosen theme and whose playing positions cover all of the positions needed to field a team.  For instance, the Fall 1994 EFQ issue included a roster compiled by Steven Lichtman of players whose names were appropriate for The All-Home and Hearth Team and whose positions filled out a roster.  His roster had, among other players, Alan Bannister at shortstop and Tommy John among the pitchers.  In addition to the roster by Lichtman, my copies of EFQ include rosters fashioned by Mikhail Horowitz.  The editors wrote the first Roster - The All-Fish Team - which appeared in the last issue of MRB.  It was accompanied by a call for rosters to be contributed by readers.

Inspired by their efforts, I have tried my hand at creating a roster for The-All Geology and Paleontology Team.  (None of the roster columns in my very small sample of EFQ issues or in any of the issues listed on eBay that I've looked at covers this same theme.)  The roster I filled out is very heavy on the geology side, barely touching paleontology.  To populate my roster, I first went through my print copy of The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition, 2007, then, to fill a gap or two in the roster, I went to the online Baseball Reference, a great source of baseball statistics and history.  I used the Baseball Reference to create the player profiles given below.  Of note, I limited myself to players who took the field before 1940.  I also did not expand my roster to add additional "bench" players or add a manager.

I found this to be a sobering, even melancholic, enterprise.  For many of these players, their major league careers were starkly brief moments, their presence barely recorded in the game’s annals.  I suspect that, for at least some, the experience carried an outsized weight.  Thoughts and, perhaps, regret about what might have been?  Though I did not deliberately seek out obscure players, no one on my roster is a household name.

In my annotated roster below, I first list the position, the player filling it, and his birth and death years.  Below that, I record the player’s full name, describe the length of their career and which teams they played for, and conclude with mention of an item or two that struck me as, at least, somewhat memorable about their career.  The EFQ rosters were not annotated.  (A glossary explaining most of the baseball terms and statistics cited in my annotations can found on the Major LeagueBaseball website.)

Here, then, is my all-geology and paleontology team roster:

First Base: Les Rock (1912-1991)

Lester Henry Rock played in two games for the Chicago White Sox in 1936.  He came to bat just once in his career, entering his first game as a pinch hitter.  He grounded into a double play and a runner scored on the play.  Under the rules in place at the time, Rock was credited with a run batted in (RBI).  Only a few years later, a rule change would have deprived him of that RBI.

Second Base: Charlie Pick (1888-1954)

Charles Thomas Pick played in the major leagues from 1914 through 1920, for the Washington Nationals, Philadelphia Athletics, Chicago Cubs, and Boston Braves.  In his debut in the majors, he had three hits in his first three at-bats.  He holds the major league record for most times at bat in a game without a hit, 11.

 

Shortstop: George Bone (1874-1918)

George Drummond Bone played for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1901.  He appeared in 12 games with a batting average of .302.  Baseball Reference gets into the roster game when it notes that "he is a cinch to make the 'All Body Part' team, along with players such as Dave Brain, Roy Face, and Harry Cheek."

 

Third Base: John Karst (1893-1976)

John Gottlieb Karst appeared in a single game for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1915.  He was a fielding substitution for the starting third baseman and helped turn a double play.  He never came to bat.

 

A karst is a limestone landscape where water has created sinkholes, caverns, underground streams, among other features. ( John O.E. Clark and Stella Stiegeler, The Facts on File Dictionary of Earth Science, 2000.)

 

Catcher:  Silver Flint (1855-1892)

Frank Sylvester Flint played in 1875 with the St. Louis Red Stockings, then spent a couple of years in the minor leagues, before returning to the major leagues in 1878 with the Indianapolis Blues.  From 1879 through 1889, he played for the Chicago White Stockings.  He briefly managed the White Stockings in 1879 while also playing.  During his career, he was the catcher for three no-hitters.  (A "no-hitter" - a term not defined in the MLB glossary - is a game in which one side fails to make a hit during the entire contest.)

 

Outfielder: Bill Clay (1874-1917)

Frederick C. Clay appeared in three games in 1902 for the Philadelphia Phillies, batting eight times with two hits and a run batted in.  In his debut, he had two hits in four at-bats.

 

Outfielder:  Jerry D’Arcy (1885-1924)

Jeremiah Joseph D’Arcy played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1911.  He had six at-bats over the course of two games, but failed to make a hit.  According to Baseball Reference, D’Arcy was “a player whose true identity long eluded researchers.”  A "Jerry Dorsey" reportedly played for the Pittsburgh Pirates for two games in 1911, but much of information on the man was contradictory or missing.  It wasn’t until 2013 that it was proven that Dorsey was, in fact, a person named Jerry D’Arcy.

 

In geology, a darcy is a unit of measure of the permeability of rock.  (John O.E. Clark and Stella Stiegeler, The Facts on File Dictionary of Earth Science, 2000.)

 

Outfielder:  George Stone (1876-1945)

George Robert Stone played in 1903 for the Boston Americans, and then from 1905 to 1910 with the St. Louis Browns.  Stone was a good hitter with a career batting average of .301.  In 1905, he led the American League in hits (187) and topped the major leagues in batting average in 1906 (.358).

 

Pitcher:  Shovel Hodge (1893-1967)

Clarence Clemet Hodge appeared in 75 games for the Chicago White Sox from 1920 through 1922.  Of the 20 games he started, he pitched complete games in 8.  Baseball Reference reports that he was called “Shovel” because, at one time, he was quite heavy and brought to mind a steam shovel.

 

Pitcher:  Bob Spade (1877-1924)

Robert Spade debuted in 1907 with the Cincinnati Reds at the age of 30 and played for them until 1910, when he was traded mid-season to the St. Louis Browns.  His career ended after 1910.  His most impressive season was 1908 when he had a record of 17 wins and 12 defeats.  That season, he started 28 games and pitched complete games in 22 of them.

 

Pitcher:  Reese Diggs (1915-1978)

Reese Wilson Diggs pitched for the Washington Nationals in 1934, appearing in four games.  That year, he was the youngest player in the American League.  He started three games and pitched complete games in two.

 

Pitcher:  Ray Miner (1897-1963)

Raymond Theodore Miner pitched one inning in one game for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1921.  It was not a good outing because he gave up two hits, walked three batters, and yielded four runs.  He has a statistically weird claim to fame, starting his career, ending it, and dying on the same month and day:  September 15.  Strangely enough, he’s not the only major league player to have achieved this distinction.  Lou Raymond made those three transitions on May 2.

Since I was attempting to emulate them, I thought it might be interesting to learn a bit about the two authors who composed rosters in the issues I own of the EFQ (one column by Lichtman and several by Horowitz).  When Steven Lichtman’s roster column appeared in the Fall 1994 issue, he was a newly minted lawyer.  He later earned a PhD in political science and is now an associate professor at Shippensburg State University.  Though he doesn’t list the EFQ roster column in his curriculum vitae (understandable in the scheme of things), I don’t think he abandoned baseball completely.  At one point in his wandering in the academic wilderness of two-year appointments, he taught at Dickinson College.  An article about his impending departure from the college appeared in the May 20, 2005, issue of the Dickinson student newspaper.  It quoted a student who said of Lichtman:  “He was equally willing to discuss John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' as that night's baseball game."  

Mikhail Horowitz was described in the EFQ as “the author of Big League Poets (City Lights, 1978) and a contributor to many outré baseball anthologies.”  That doesn’t quite capture his multifaceted career as a poet, musician, writer, journalist, comedian, and satirist; baseball runs through his poetry and creative output.  A recent interview offers some insight.  (Howard Altarescu, Writers of the Catskills:  In Conversation With Mikhail Horowitz, TheOverlook, December 25, 2025.)

I think I’m in good company.