Player Pages > Moonlight Graham > Player Stats

One game played as a defensive replacement is all Archibald "Moonlight" Graham ever got out of his major league ballplaying career. Yet, because of his fictionalized role in a popular baseball novel, his name is remembered today. Graham was a small, light-hitting outfielder who got a quick look from Giants' manager John McGraw in the Summer of 1905. He played in the field but never batted, and after a few years in the minors, he turned his attention to medical school. After graduating from the University of Maryland, he served more than four decades in Chisholm, Minnesota, as the community physician. "Doc" Graham became a legend in the region, and died at the age of 88, in 1965. Author W.P. Kinsella noticed his one-game entry in the Baseball Encyclopedia, and used him as a character in Shoeless Joe, a novel about a mystical farm in Iowa that attracts the ghost of Joe Jackson. In the subsequent 1989 film Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, Graham's character was played by Burt Lancaster (doctor) and Frank Whaley (ballplayer). The wildly popular film immortalized Graham, and today a rock band and clothing line bear his name.