Last month I did a really long post about the pictures on the current background of redsox.com. Picture #6 (at the top, second from left) is a catcher. But unlike all the other guys shown, it doesn't seem to be a Red Sox player. In fact, I think it's...a Yankees player. Since this is the most intriguing picture, and since what I wrote about it was so far down the original post, I figured I'd isolate that text and show you the specific picture in a new post. At left is picture of the catcher in question. Below, my original thoughts on it. Please let me know if you have any opinions/info about this--we have to figure this out! (And if we confirm it's not a Red Sox, we need to tell them about it!)


6. Back to the top, to the right of Beckett: This one has proven to be quite controversial. We have a catcher in pinstripes. Yes, the Red Sox used to wear pinstripes, back before 1932. But I've been doing a lot of research on this, and the gear and the sleeve length tell me this is much later, like the late 30s at the earliest. Also, this "throw off the mask" pose didn't gain popularity until then--catchers up until that point were usually posed in a crouch. And by then, you pretty much had one team wearing pinstripes. That's right, I feel like this has to be a Yankee catcher. I don't see a sign of the NY or anything else on the chest, but it could be barely hidden by the chest protector. Call me crazy, but this looks like Bill Dickey. The face kind of looks like anybody's face when they look upwards, but it still seems to match all the pics I see of Dickey. In fact, from what I've seen, I might even go so far as calling Dickey the "father" of this pose. And the background looks like Yankee Stadium. Fenway back when the Red Sox wore pinstripes had its seats set higher up, almost on top of the fence. I also found a shot of Dickey at the Yanks' spring training park, and it also looks like this. But I think it's Dickey, at Yankee Stadium, circa 1941. Why would the Red Sox use a Yankee picture? I don't know, maybe they found an old catcher photo in their archives and assumed it was one of their own. I hope I'm wrong here, but all signs point to Bill Dickey, or at least a Yankee. Or at least not a Red Sock. Weird. Tell me what you think....


The entire collage-style background is shown in my original post, or (for now) at redsox.com.

Note: If you read the original post, you'll see I did use the reverse image search at a last resort with other pics--I did it with this too (along with all kinds of other searching) and couldn't find this same image anywhere. That would be key. Until then we're stuck using the clues within the picture.