A Face, a Name, and the Void Between

The frequency of North American baseball players randomly disappearing from their teams reached a peak in the early 20th century. Baseball was a big enough deal that a player going missing was newsworthy, which allowed me to read about their disappearances a century later. At the same time, baseball was not yet a big enough deal that choosing to skip out on your team meant missing a multi-million dollar payday, or the prospect of multi-million dollar legal action brought against you. The phenomenon seemed so common in the early 1900s that the stories of players going missing were often preceded with “another” or followed by “again,” and the tales were plentiful enough to allow for quite a bit of variety in their conclusions.

While the tale of the bridegroom who never came arrived from the late 19th century, the stories that will follow over the next few entries hail from a time when both the American and National Leagues existed alongside a veritable wilderness of competitive minor league teams, constantly moving, changing names, collapsing, scheming, and springing up again. It was the perfect time for baseball players to get lost in intrigue and confusion — and a time in which it was easy for players to be obscured by history. We begin with a story of the latter.

***

This is the very brief tale of Everett L. Sweetser, a 27-year-old semiprofessional baseball player and resident of North Yarmouth, Maine. By all accounts, Sweetser wasn’t a particularly notable player. In fact, I can find no public connection between his name and the word “baseball” until August 6, 1912: the day that his missing notice was published in the Boston Globe.

You may notice that this item describes Sweetser as “well-known.” And maybe he was, in his time. Maybe Sweetser was the name on the collective lips of the Northeast, or at least of North Yarmouth. But of all the paths of missing players I’ve tried to follow, Sweetser’s has been the least clear. There is essentially no textual evidence of his existence before his disappearance, at least that I can find. The same goes for the years after this. No box scores or game stories; no tales of Sweetser’s heroism, or Sweetser’s errors, or Sweetser doing absolutely anything to do with baseball. Neither was there any story confirming that he had been found. Complicating the search, too, is the fact that there was another Everett L. Sweetser running around the Northeast at the same time our Sweetser was, and that this one happened to be a fairly prominent member of the military. An already obscure trail had been trampled by the historical footprints of another. One might well wonder if Everett L. Sweetser ever existed — if his name had been misprinted, or his story otherwise misrepresented.

And yet, there is one single other piece of information that I managed to find — something that seems to confirm that Everett L. Sweetser of North Yarmouth did, indeed, play baseball. It’s a photograph published in Around North Yarmouth, a book of oral history and personal photographs by Lincoln J. Merrill and Holly K. Hurd. The photo, dated to 1910, shows nine somber-faced young men in dark jerseys, the letters CUMBERLAND CTR. on their chests in bright white; to the left stands a man with a mustache and a white hat, holding a book whose cover I can’t make out. The caption closes with this line: “In 1909, North Yarmouth and Cumberland formed a baseball association, which included residents Maurice Hayes (lower left) as shortstop and Everett Sweetser on third base.”

Which of these nine young men was Everett Sweetser? Is this him, the one man seated beside Maurice Hayes? He has his cap drawn down over his brow, much farther down than any other player; his hair is cropped tight, and he looks darkly up at the camera. Or is it him, seated here in the middle, the first person your eye travels to — his arms relaxed, leaning a casual elbow on the arm of the chair, a friendly swoop of hair framing his lone smiling face? Or is it him here in the back, looming far above his teammates, his jaw tight and his arms held behind him? Who is he? He is here, but we can’t find him.

Maurice Hayes stares out from the lower left. Seated on the lowest of the three tiers into which the players had been arranged for the photo, he is cut off at the chest, his face half in shadow; your eye has to be drawn to him by the caption, lest he fade into the margins. He is a face who has a name — we can see him. Everett Sweetser has a name, and he has a face. Yet we can’t make the two meet. They slide past each other, still elusive. Everett Sweetser looks at us, but we cannot look back at him.

All we have of Everett Sweetser is this, then: a missing notice, published weeks after he’d last been heard from and in a state he didn’t live in — his family likely trying to use his status as a baseball player to generate any recognition at all, spark any remembrance of having seen him or heard of him. A photograph. A name and a face: nothing between, nothing beyond.

***

At the time of the 1940 U.S. Census, there was a certain resident of Portland, Maine, named Everett Sweetsir. He reported his age as 52, which would put his birth date somewhere around 1888; he had a wife, Lenora, and a child, Lawrence. Back in 1912, Everett L. Sweetser, semiprofessional baseball player, left his home to purchase a new set of clothes. He was headed to Portland.

I can see it all unfolding now: Everett Sweetser meeting Lenora in the course of his baseball travels. They fall in love. Perhaps there were financial considerations, perhaps not. Whatever the case, they decide that they won’t be parted — they must elope. And one day in the heat of midsummer, Everett Sweetser tells his parents that he’s going to Portland to get a new suit. He’s not lying, exactly, just omitting information. A new suit for a new life. The pair settle, and the family is alerted; they see no reason to broadcast this personal business to the public. The years pass, and time blurs the details: Sweetser becomes Sweetsir, 1885 becomes 1888. Maybe he played some baseball along the way there, too.

Or maybe Everett Sweetsir is just Everett Sweetsir. Maybe a young man left home one day and never came back. We have a face, and we have a name; everything else is mist, a vision we can’t touch.