[Between 2009 and 2011, I maintained a TypePad blog, “More Fiends,” intended to update my book Baseball Fiends and Flying Machines. Those posts can still be found in the archive.org Wayback Machine, but I stopped updating that site in 2011. Because this WordPress site promotes and updates all my books, I’d like to republish some of those earlier posts.]
Posted 3/16/2010:
Recently digitized editions of Sporting Life have provided more details on the amateur players that accompanied Lawson on his 1892 and 1895 tours of England. In the case of the 1892 team, I only had fragmentary information before, but now some of the blanks are filled in:
In the case of the 1895 team, I had all of the names, but the places where the players hailed from is more accurate:
In Baseball Fiends and Flying Machines I leave open the possibility that the 1895 team, in particular, might have been loaded with minor league pros sailing under aliases, but now I tend to give Lawson the benefit of the doubt. Sporting Life also ran the ads he placed for players, and he was angling for amateurs or unoccupied semi-pro players.