Lou Proctor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lou Proctor is an example of a "phantom ballplayer," an American baseball player listed in the baseball encyclopedias by mistake. Over two dozen "phantoms" have been expunged from baseball's official record book Total Baseball and its predecessor, The Baseball Encyclopedia.
Proctor was not a baseball player at all, but supposedly a telegraph operator in Cleveland who inserted his own name into a Boston Red Sox box score on May 13, 1912, walking once as a pinch hitter for the St. Louis Browns. Research in the mid-1980s, however, revealed that the at-bat actually belonged to a real St. Louis player named Pete Compton. Whether Proctor ever really existed (even as a prankish telegraph operator) is unknown.
