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Posted By: Jay

As I mentioned, Fischer never played a regular season game for the Maroons. Neither did Boyd, but there is info about him in TSN, including when he was scheduled to report. As also mentioned above, the photo shoots were prior to the regular season. If the player happened to be part of the team during that time, he got his picture taken. The fact that Fischer has a card, in a Maroon uniform, means that he was part of the team for some period of time. That period could have been a day or two, a week, or several weeks. He was not on the team at the beginning of April, 1888. He was not on the team at the end of April, 1888 when the season started. Did he play in a pre-season game for the Maroons--possibly. I have not seen any April Maroon box scores. The possibility exists that he never played in any game for them, but even so, even the lowliest walk-ons received some mention in TSN, and I would think that any local paper with decent baseball coverage would have mentioned a potential player. Could he have been using an assumed name (like Stowe/Stovey)--sure. That might hinder efforts to find prior or future stats, but he still would have been identified in the press using the assumed name.
There is no elegant way to find stuff out about guys like this--the only path to positive results (if such a path exists) is digging through newspapers.