Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John Fischer (baseball)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Eddie891 Talk Work 22:05, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

John Fischer (baseball)

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Non-notable, BEFORE check yielded nothing, only source is a database. Fails WP:GNG completely. QuicoleJR (talk) 18:50, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Baseball and United States of America. QuicoleJR (talk) 18:50, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sportspeople-related deletion discussions. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:57, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * A source that's arguably sigcov here. I would expect that someone who had started nine MLB games would have sufficient coverage to meet GNG. BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:09, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Looks trivial to me, but even if that is SIGCOV, that is only one source. QuicoleJR (talk) 19:28, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I mean, its 11 lines devoted to him and has various different details that could be used to improve the biography; considering the accomplishments of this player and the great difficulty of finding sources (due to his age and name), I'd consider it SIGCOV. Now if we could only have another source like that... BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:34, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Considering what accomplishments? Also, I guess that would be SIGCOV, but we need more sources for notability. QuicoleJR (talk) 19:50, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Are we no longer considering playing professional baseball to be a notable accomplishment? If so, we have 1000s of articles to delete.  Skipple  ☎  19:52, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * 1. I am unable to find a spot where we ever said that playing professional baseball was a notability criterion.
 * 2. Subject-specific notability guidelines do not replace GNG, as stated by the guidelines themselves. QuicoleJR (talk) 20:01, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * From the early 2000's up until the March 2022 NSPORTS discussion we held that playing any game in MLB made you automatically notable. BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:03, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Ah, I understand. That would mean that we no longer consider playing professional baseball to be a notability criterion. QuicoleJR (talk) 20:06, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * No, sportspeople always needed to meet GNG, but playing in the MLB afforded a strong presumption that GNG would be met. JoelleJay (talk) 15:54, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * ... a presumption so strong that it acted as de facto automatic notability. BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:03, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * By accomplishments, I meant playing nine MLB games (all as a starter, too). BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:06, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Pennsylvania-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 19:10, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Can anybody locate the source referenced here? It may be our second sigcov piece. BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:39, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Here's what I could find:
 *  Skipple  ☎  19:47, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I think you might have the SABR link wrong; it says "September/October report" while we're looking for May/June. BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:04, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * You are correct! I must have copy-hyperlink-ed the wrong one. Thanks!  Skipple  ☎  20:21, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I was able to locate the May/June report, see here. It gives about three paragraphs on Fischer (I've copied it below):
 * "John Fischer
 * This player started out as an unknown player simply named Fisher. He pitched with Philadelphia
 * (UA) in 1884 and Buffalo in 1885. He was listed as being from Johnstown, Pennsylvania and had in
 * fact pitched for Johnstown in 1884. An 1886 note from Sporting Life enabled us to identify this player.
 * 'Johnny Fisher, the excellent Williamsport pitcher, has been released at his request, and is at his
 * home, 303 Canal Street, this city, waiting for something to turn up.'
 * The 1860 census showed the family at that address. John was the son of Christian and Dora Fischer,
 * age 4. He was also easy to track through the Philadelphia city directories, staying at the 303 Canal
 * Street address through the 1890s. The 1900 census shows him living with his wife Mary and father-in-
 * law Silas Hepburn. He appears in the census through 1930, and Peter Morris was able to find an obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lists him as the husband of Mary Fischer (nee Hepburn)." BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:13, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Street address through the 1890s. The 1900 census shows him living with his wife Mary and father-in-
 * law Silas Hepburn. He appears in the census through 1930, and Peter Morris was able to find an obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lists him as the husband of Mary Fischer (nee Hepburn)." BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:13, 5 April 2023 (UTC)


 * After thinking about this for awhile, I think I'll go with a part-IAR/GNG/NBASIC Weak Keep on this one. So, to start, this guy played nine games of Major League Baseball, the highest level of the sport ever in existence, as a starting pitcher. He was in the league for two seasons, playing with the Philadelphia Keystones and Buffalo Bisons, as well as at least three other minor league teams (Johnstown, Williamsport, and an Eastern League team). And he played in the old-time leagues, in the 1880s, for which coverage is very difficult to find for several reasons (among these reasons the age (i.e. many of the papers back then that would have covered him are now entirely offline or no longer exist!) and because the papers would often refer to players just by their last name, and "Fischer" is very common; just from 1880 to 1890, that name is recorded hundreds of thousands of times via Newspapers.com). In the past, we've only ever gotten rid of two MLB players, one of which played one game and the other two; Fischer played nearly five times that amount, and as a starter, too. Currently, at least one definite piece of significant coverage has been found on him: Fischer's biography in The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball which gives 11 lines on him and mentions him in several other places, giving various details that could be used to improve the article we have here (from Johnstown, with Iron & Oil Association, joined Philadelphia with his Johnstown batterymate, etc.). WP:GNG requires only "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"; also found was the article from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR, above) which gives three more paragraphs on how he was for the longest time only known as "Fischer" and how only recently research found his first name. This source could be considered on the very outer edge of WP:SIGCOV, which only gives the vague definition of "directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content" – I think this could be considered as falling under that, and I definitely think that an article on a 19th-century MLB player with as many games as him should be given more leeway source-wise, as, as I said above, sources are extremely difficult to locate and he had a decent amount of games (if this was a one-gamer, I probably would not be making this argument). So, based on these sources, I do believe we have enough to write a somewhat decent biography of this guy (and maybe even get a DYK piece: ... that 1880s MLB pitcher John Fischer was known only by his last name until 2014?) and think we have enough for a part GNG/NBASIC and IAR (I don't think deleting an article on a player with such accomplishments would improve the encyclopedia, and both WP:NOTABILITY/WP:NSPORT say that This ... [is] an English Wikipedia notability guideline: It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. (emphasis added); I think this would be one of those "occasional exceptions") weak keep BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:26, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. I appreciate that BF is making a sincere and mostly guideline-based argument as to why we should keep this article, but I disagree that those reasons are sufficient. I think NOPAGE and NOT are important aspects in maintaining a curated, non-directory encyclopedia, and the fact that people who are literally paid to research old-timey baseball could only find a few bare-bones snippets tracking Fischer's life is a solid indication that a standalone biography is not warranted. If all we can say about him is that he pitched for the Keystones in 1884 and stayed with the Philadelphia semipro team after the Keystones left the UA, that he then filled in as pitcher for one game with Buffalo in 1885 because they were in Philly and he was available, that he was released in 1886, and census data on who his parents and wife were, then we really do not have anything here that we wouldn't be able to find for almost any American adult male employed in a large city during that period.   Playing in the MLB has been specifically rejected as a criterion to presume notability or even SIGCOV (and thus merely having a standard, mostly-stats blurb in Rank and File, which profiles every player, is not sufficient to meet SPORTSBASIC and wouldn't count as SIGCOV), so an argument where retention is based wholly on the opinion that some subset of MLB players are inherently notable despite the lack of sourcing appears to be an end-run around NSPORTS2022. JoelleJay (talk) 16:23, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep the SABR source presented above is WP:SIGCOV of the subject player, and I believe this along with minor mentions/other sources provided by Skipple are enough to meet WP:NBASIC whereas If the depth of coverage in any given source is not substantial, then multiple independent sources may be combined to demonstrate notability; trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not usually sufficient to establish notability. I think there is enough here but even if it falls a little short, WP:COMMONSENSE needs to prevail considering this is a player who has started nine games at the highest level at the sport.  Frank   Anchor  19:02, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Notability is not inherited from one's employment, and NSPORTS2022 removed all participation-based presumptions, including for multi-game athletess. The SABR piece looks to be a primary, first-person newsletter circulated internally within the committee, not a published secondary article. And of the ~160 words in it, the vast majority are unencyclopedic trivia (like his street address, and which censuses he appeared in, and the fact that the only info the BRC initially had was his last name). JoelleJay (talk) 20:30, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I am aware of NSPORTS2022, just as you aware that there are cases in which the rules aren’t perfect. Like I said before, I believe it to be a weak pass of NBASIC anyway.  Frank   Anchor  16:56, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * You are correct in that the participation criteria were removed in NSPORTS2022; however, it did not ban using COMMONSENSE/IAR, which is still a valid argument for players of these accomplishments/age and is what Frank Anchor and I are suggesting. BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:01, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * We have seriously gone down to using WP:IAR in deletion debates? QuicoleJR (talk) 21:34, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * WP:Notability says that there are cases when IAR is to be used; this is in my opinion one of those cases (although our keeps were partially based on GNG/NBASIC as well). BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:43, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * But why is someone whose career was so utterly brief and unremarkable, whose biography can only contain routine sports stats and census data, worth overriding NOT and NOPAGE for? 1880s baseball was a newer sport that didn't get anywhere near the attention or prestige it gets now, nor was going pro close to being as selective. Readers get no encyclopedic secondary context beyond what they could find on the pages for his teams' seasons, so the entry is barely more than a baseball directory entry. JoelleJay (talk) 22:23, 7 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Keep. Passes WP:GNG. Fischer has been the subject of WP:SIGCOV (addressing him directly and in detail) in pieces written by two leading historians. The first piece, The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball, is a book written by baseball's leading biographical historian, David Nemec. The second is a biographical research report published by the Society of American Baseball Research and prepared by Bill Carle, who has been the Chairman of SABR's Biographical Research Committee since 1988. These sources, written over a hundred years after Fischer's career, are the antithesis of a "primary source" (as JoelleJay asserted above) and demonstrate the enduring interest in Fisher's major-league career. Cbl62 (talk) 16:38, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Where is the secondary analysis of Fischer in the BRC newsletter? It just says that he played in 1884 and 1885, adds that he was released in 1886 with a quote from his hometown paper, and then repeats more info from censuses/directories, most of which is non-encyclopedic trivia. The only context it adds is primary, first-person commentary on how difficult it was to find sources on Fischer. JoelleJay (talk) 23:44, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * You seem to have a misunderstanding of what constitutes primary vs. secondary sources. The sources I referenced above were written by historians more than 100 years after the events in question. They are plainly not primary sources. See Secondary source (one "that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere"). Cbl62 (talk) 02:49, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It's a committee newsletter, not a published research or news article under editorial control, containing first-person investigative commentary from the author on how they found sources plus disjoint statements repeating what is said in each primary census/directory, without any analysis of the content in those sources. What info about Fischer do we gain from it that can't be found by merely looking at the censuses etc.? JoelleJay (talk) 04:12, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Your effort to dismiss the source doesn't hold up. SABR is the preeminent publisher on baseball history, and Bill Carle has been Chairman of its Biographical Research Committee for 35 years. Gathering and reporting on primary sources is a core part of secondary historical research. The fact that SABR and Carle have undertaken the effort to examine, collect, and report on the available historical sources demonstrates that Fischer has some degree of enduring notability. Nobody's saying that Fischer is headed for the Hall of Fame, but he does satisfy our notability standards, having played parts of two seasons in Major League baseball and having been the subject of significant historical research by two respected baseball historians (Nemec and Carle). Cbl62 (talk) 12:58, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Nemec has written biographies for all 19th century players/umps/managers, and SABR is attempting to write biographies on all 18,000+ MLB players ever, indiscriminately. There's nothing particular that prompted them to write about Fischer other than that they eventually got around to him. If having an entry in RaF (and Fischer's is below average for multi-game players -- note that sentences 2, 3, and 4 are merely reporting his team's performance in particular games, nothing is actually said about him; really, every sentence is just prosified stats except for #10ish) and a blurb in a SABR committee newsletter (which is very different from the peer-reviewed published biographies from SABR) is sufficient to meet GNG then the baseball project should have raised this as a reason to exempt them from the participation criterion deprecation. JoelleJay (talk) 00:36, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Also, why should someone playing 20 games that only get primary (the sources for your secondary sources link and for WP:SECONDARY say contemporaneous newspaper articles are primary...), routine coverage be more deserving of a wikipedia article than someone playing 2 games with the same coverage, just because there are more stats to prosify and thus a longer "biography" can be written? JoelleJay (talk) 01:07, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but I'm not following your hypothetical. In general, I would agree with you that it's likely that someone who played 20 games is more likely to be notable (i.e., to have received SIGCOV) than someone who played two games. Cbl62 (talk) 01:33, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
 * My point is that someone who played more games will have more routine sports stats reported, and more non-GNG/BASIC coverage of their matches, and these can be used to "expand" a WP biography. However, since neither the routine stats nor the sources contribute to notability (and would not be DUE in the article anyway) the many-games subject is not more notable than someone with equivalent sourcing depth but fewer games, even if the former's biography is 10x longer. This is also relevant for other sources, such as RaF or Wisden, where stats/matches played can be prosified without adding any additional context or even covering the subject directly. See, for example, the strong consensus to delete Uwe Bengs, Otto Oeldenberger, Fritz Sommer, etc. despite their having paragraphs of prosified stats on them in at least one book each and having lengthy de.wiki articles. JoelleJay (talk) 03:37, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
 * NSPORT2022 removed the presumption that all major league players are notable but did not make a presumption that they are non-notable or a requirement that they need to meet a higher standard than GNG. NSPORT2022 referred the issue back to GNG. If all major league players (which of course is a small subset of all professional baseball players) happen to meet GNG (and as of now at least there are probably some that don't) then they are all notable under NSPORT2022 (without need for a presumption of notability) and that should not be an issue. Rlendog (talk) 15:07, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep. Based on the sources mentioned above and my general disagreement with the change in sports notability from that 2022 discussion where a handful of people just simply wore everyone down by continually adding new options until the people opposed to the changes simply got tired and left. Spanneraol (talk) 02:03, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * You cannot base your vote in an AfD on your opinion of the guidelines. QuicoleJR (talk) 12:26, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I can base my vote on anything I want to base it on.. and that was just one of the reasons. Spanneraol (talk) 13:26, 9 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Note: At the time of the nomination, the article was a brief sub-stub sourced only to Baseball-Reference.com. The article has now been substantially expanded with sourcing to two pieces of SIGCOV written by noted baseball historians as well as contemporaneous coverage from the 1880s. Cbl62 (talk) 16:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I am withdrawing my nomination and voting keep per article improvements. QuicoleJR (talk) 18:12, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for keeping an open mind! Can we now persuade you to join the Keep Karavan? Cbl62 (talk) 18:24, 9 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Keep - sources added are adequate to convince me he meets GNG. Rlendog (talk) 14:54, 12 April 2023 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.