This may be a Game Room question, I don’t know.
Roughly how many people have played major league baseball over the years? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
This may be a Game Room question, I don’t know.
Roughly how many people have played major league baseball over the years? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
That is awesome. Thank you!
Ignorance fought. Close the thread.
Major league teams have 25 players on their active roster at any time though back in the early 1900s they may not have been full. There were 16 teams up until 1961 (though there was a third league for two years in 1914-15). If the average career was 5 years (probably too long as there were many very short ones), there would be 121625 = 4800 right there. Since 1961 the leagues have grown to 30 teams and in nay given year probably almost every man on the 40 man roster gets up to the bigs at least in September. So if we take an average number of teams = 24 (conservative since we got to 12 by 1969) and lengthen the average career to 7 to account for the rookie callups, we have another (53/7)4024=7269.
So the answer must be in the tens of thousands I’d say.
Including, of course, Archibald ‘Moonlight’ Graham and Larry Yount?
There are dozens of “phantom players” who suited up in the majors and never took the field.
Moved to the Game Room.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Not quite.
Moonlight Graham did indeed hit the field in the movie AND in the majors. One game, no at bats. He was in the on-deck circle as a pinch hitter when the man ahead of him made the third out in the 8th inning. Then he played an inning in right and that was it.
But it counts as appearing in a game. Can’t take that away from him.
That’s right, he fielded but never batted. There are others who suited up and never left the bench, though, and Yount is the crown prince of phantoms.
Wow. I had no idea - never even heard the term. Good link.
Jeez, I came closer to The Book than some of those guys.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you don’t “leave the bench” you don’t get credited with a game played, and wouldn’t appear on any of the lists in this thread.
If you do “leave the bench” and get credited with a game played, 99.9% of the time you will participate in the game for at least one pitch. Yount didn’t because of the highly unusual circumstance of getting injured while warming up. If there are any other phantoms like Yount, who got credited with a game played but never actually participated in game action, I’d be interested in hearing about them. I’ve never heard of any.
There were 230 debuts in 2013. The totals on the two links giving 17744 through start of 2013 and 18174 as of October 2013 are two different sites. The two sites will never match. The first one is for baseball.almanac.com. The second one is baseball-reference.com. Baseball Almanac does not include the 1871-75 National Association players in their major league player count.