First Gloves: Rollie Hemsley

Or is it Rolly?

I always thought it was Rollie, and his grave marker says Rollie, and most of the baseball cards I’ve seen for him say Rollie, and he’s mostly listed as Rollie in newspaper accounts. On his page on the official Major League Baseball site he’s listed as Rollie, and the same goes for his Baseball-Reference.com page. No alternative spellings are noted on either.

But then there are a couple of baseball cards that list him as Rolly, like this one:

That’s a 1938 Goudey card.

And there are a more than a few newspaper accounts of him where he’s named as Rolly. Over 4,000 of them in the Newspapers.com archives, in fact, including this one:

From the Great Falls (MT) Leader, July 10,1940.