Chasing Moonlight

by Brett Friedlander

Late on the afternoon of June 29, 1905, Archibald Graham bolted out of the New York Giants' dugout and took his position in right field for the first and only time as a major league baseball player. He played only an inning and a half. The Giants made their last out as Graham waited in the on-deck circle. The 27-year-old journeyman, who was affectionately known as "Moonlight" because of his off-season occupation as a medical student, was sent back to the minors and, presumably, into permanent obscurity. In the mid-1980s, nearly 20 years after Graham's death, author W. P. Kinsella stumbled across a single line entry in the Baseball Encyclopedia while he was researching a book about Shoeless Joe Jackson. It was the name Moonlight Graham that first caught Kinsella's attention, but the fact that Graham never got to bat in the majors made him even more interesting to a fiction writer. Graham became a secondary character in Kinsella's book, Shoeless Joe. In 1989, Hollywood director and scree