List of Major League Baseball players with unidentified given names

Forty individuals who played professional baseball at the major league level lack identified given names. Identification of players remains difficult due to a lack of biographical information; a Brooklyn, New York, directory, for instance, lists more than 30 men who could be the professional player "Stoddard". Possible mistakes in reading 19th-century box scores could have also led to players without given names, as "Eland", for example, could be another player from the Baltimore Marylands roster whose name was simply misread. Philadelphia Athletics manager Bill Sharsig signed four of the 40, "local players" McBride, Stafford, Sterling, and Sweigert, for Philadelphia's last game of the season against the Syracuse Stars on October 12, 1890. Sterling pitched five innings for the Athletics and conceded 12 runs. McBride, Philadelphia's center fielder, and Stafford, the team's right fielder, both failed to reach base, but left fielder Sweigert reached base on a walk and stole a base. Society for American Baseball Research writer Bill Carle "doubt[s] we will ever be able to identify them".