'Moonlight' Graham played 1 inning in the Major Leagues but became a legend anyway
A.W. "Moonlight" Graham's baseball card. (Courtesy of Doc Graham Memorial Scholarship Fund)
NEW YORK - The drafting of former New York football Giants quarterback Eli Manning may seem an odd place to start a story about baseball lore but the man at the helm of the organization on that day the football Giants swapped selections with the Chargers to bring a 23-year-old out of Ole Miss who'd go on to win a couple of rings and two Super Bowl MVPs to New York, four decades earlier chanced upon a spirit of New York baseball Giants past.
"It's an interesting story," former (football) Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi said. "They won 25 straight games and all the other teams in the league decided to fold."
Accorsi referred there not to the baseball Giants but the minor league 1902 Charlotte Hornets, who held a reunion in July of 1963 to which the Charlotte News sent their brand new cub reporter, a 21-year-old Accorsi on his very first assignment. On that day, Accorsi asked the event's organizer "who was good?", which led him to an 87-year-old doctor named Archibald Graham.
"He was really old and I was 21," Accorsi said, "so I wasn't that enthused about it."
Accorsi listened to Doc Graham recount tidbits from his career ("in his story he sort of brags about himself a little bit," Accorsi said), left the reunion, filed his story and forgot about it — until decades later, when flipping through a scrapbook of old clippings kept by his mother, Accorsi found that 1963 profile and the picture accompanying it and realized the subject of his first published piece ("I was mortified at some of the verbs I used") was one and the same as the ballplayer known as Moonlight.
"It really kind of gave me chills up and down my spine," Accorsi said.
Moonlight Graham played only a single inning of a single 1905 game in the bigs for the New York baseball Giants, never fielding a ball or swinging a bat, before retiring for a lengthy and distinguished career in medicine. He now lives in the public's consciousness nearly a century later thanks to his Burt Lancaster/Frank Whaley portrayal in the 1989 classic Field of Dreams.
"No one's called me Moonlight Graham in 50 years," Lancaster says in the film.
"When I looked at [my story]," Accorsi said, "I was dumbfounded. I thought: 'This can't be' because that's one of my two or three all-time favorite movies."
"You know we just don't recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they are happening," Lancaster as an old Graham tells Kevin Costner's character.
"I had no idea he was going to become a legend," Accorsi said of Graham.
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"The facts [in the movie] are gnarled but the story is wonderful," Graham biographer Bob Riesing said.
Riesing co-authored "Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams' Doc Graham" ("he didn't look like Burt Lancaster, I'll tell you that," Accorsi said) and recounted for us the skill of the man nicknamed Moonlight by his minor league teammates for the speed at which he traveled the basepaths.
"I'm not sure astronomers agree with that image," Riesing said, "but that was the beginning of Moonlight."
"Speed: I remember him talking about how he could run," Accorsi said.
"The tragedy of this situation was that he played just one game and he deserved a lengthy career," Riesing said.
Graham always planned to practice medicine, graduating medical school before the start of the 1905 season.
"His goal — really very realistic, had he not had terrible problems with John McGraw, a very unfair man — [was to] succeed in both baseball and medicine," Riesing said.
Hall-of-fame manager John McGraw skippered the Giants to three World Series titles and could not accept playing a right fielder moonlighting as a doctor or giving an opportunity to a doctor moonlighting as a right fielder.
"It was a clash of personalities," Riesing said, "and, understandably, Moonlight could not accept the priorities of McGraw."
So, after Graham stood in right field for that uneventful ninth inning on June 29, 1905, at Washington Park in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood against the team that went on to become the Dodgers, the New York Sun wrote "no chances came his way so that his first experience as a Major League player consisted of nothing but preparedness" and the Giants went on to win that season's championship, McGraw left Moonlight off the 1906 roster after a promising spring training.
"[Graham] knew in his heart and his head and baseball people knew in their hearts and their heads that he deserved a real opportunity," Riesing said, "that he deserved to be on the roster of 1906."
Moonlight won a batting title in Scranton that season and started practicing medicine in Chisholm, Minnesota, a community he'd serve for the next five decades, documenting and then publishing the first evidence of blood pressure irregularities in children for the Mayo Clinic.
"All medical students thereafter had to read the paper developed at Mayo, with Dr. Graham as its head," Riesing said.
Dr. Graham died in the summer of 1965, just two years after chatting with Accorsi ("I was most likely the last person to ever interview him," Accorsi said), leaving behind — thanks in part to the film's telling of his legacy — a reminder of the power of second acts.
"It's a story of overcoming disappointment," Riesing said, "overcoming a major disappointment, overcoming a disappointment that would've destroyed other men."
"As I think back now on my life in sports — and I've loved every minute of it in the NFL — [talking with Graham] is one of the highlights," Accorsi said.
"[Graham] communicates in a very subtle way the value of integrity," Riesing said, "living by one's convictions, living by one's code."