SEVEN HILLS, Ohio — For four years, the snifter sat untouched on the second shelf of Randy Kula’s dining room cabinet. He wiped away the dust with a kitchen rag and then rummaged through his fridge for a beer.
No luck. Kula hadn’t prepared for this celebratory swig. He was convinced it would never happen.
He finally emerged from his basement with the only brew in his house: a Conway’s Irish Ale, from the Cleveland-based Great Lakes Brewing Co., a fitting find for a toast to an elusive Irishman who, for decades, kept Kula puzzled and possessed.
Kula snapped off the lid with a bottle opener fashioned from a seat at old Cleveland Stadium, where the Indians played for more than 60 years. He poured until the copper liquid and layer of foam covered the sentence on the side of the glass, seven words that have vexed him all these years.
Where in the world is Shorty Gallagher?
Kula refused to christen the glass until he could answer that riddle. In a navy Cleveland baseball polo, he sipped his beer and beamed as a 35-year journey culminated in this moment.
In the ’90s, Kula set out to collect a photo of every player to appear in a game for the Cleveland franchise, a charter member of the American League in 1901. He located photos of club cornerstones and of little-known part-timers, of Gen X sluggers with tobacco lodged in their cheeks, and of pre-World War I pitchers in wool jersey tops. He found photos of household names like Bob Feller and Albert Belle, as well as old-timey characters like Braggo Roth and Bris Lord.
Over the years, he whittled his targets from more than 2,000 to a few hundred, to 50, to 20, to a handful, and then, for the last 21 years, just one: Charles William “Shorty” Gallagher, who spent one afternoon in the majors on Aug. 13, 1901.
Shorty has hidden in baseball’s shadows ever since.
Kula began his pursuit in his 20s, and for a long time, the chase — even the dead ends, the polite, handwritten rejections and the tedious internet scrolling — was intoxicating. Now he’s 63, and still stumped by a guy he knows everything about, except for what he looks like.
Kula cycled through every lead, exhausted every resource, flipped through every Reach and Spalding guide, studied every newspaper issue and contacted everyone who might be related to someone who might be related to someone who might have known Shorty.
His search sputtered the last few years, and Kula’s spirit faded in the process. Nightly research became monthly research. Secondary projects took priority, such as his collection of cards of every NBA and ABA player from 1971, or his compilation of 1945 Cleveland Rams football photos. Those side quests came and went, but Shorty remained invisible — until 10:16 p.m. on Jan. 12, 2026.
With a lopsided Texans-Steelers playoff game providing a faint soundtrack to a nondescript winter night of fiddling with his laptop from the living room sofa, Kula received a Facebook message.
“Hi Randy. Finally, the search is over.”
Kula’s collection rests in a pair of chestnut-colored binders. There are a few photos of players from the Cleveland Spiders, the late-1800s outfit that ownership tore to the studs, resulting in a 20-134 record in its final season of existence.
Then, his undertaking begins, with Bock Baker, who pitched the fourth game for the franchise on April 28, 1901, and allowed 13 runs on 23 hits in eight innings. Each space in each binder is filled with a photo or card or homemade print, in alphabetical order by year of the player’s Cleveland debut.
Throughout the collecting process, Kula learned hundreds of backstories.
He corresponded with the special collections department at Harvard Law School to track down a photo of graduate Al Cypert, who struck out in his only at-bat for the Cleveland Naps in June 1914. A university employee mailed Kula more than 20 pages of material on the third baseman.
In 2003, he sent a letter to the daughter of Oscar Harstad, who pitched for the Indians in 1915. Dorothy Harstad Fenner tucked a pair of photos into an envelope, along with a handwritten note and a copy of a first-person piece her father contributed to Sports Collectors Digest a few months before he died in 1985. She stuck Kula’s note in “Dad’s Baseball Box,” the family’s stash of keepsakes.
A year later, Kula reached out to Jim Finley, a columnist for the Baytown Sun, a newspaper in southeast Texas. Finley had published an article about playing Little League ball for coach Vern Underhill, who pitched in 15 games for Cleveland in 1927-28. Finley connected Kula with Underhill’s son, Vance, who supplied Kula with a photo of his father.
He had no such fortune in unearthing a link to Shorty, a baseball nomad born in Detroit who made stops in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Indiana and Ontario before his lone day in the majors with the Cleveland Blues in 1901.
Kula knew everything about the guy: how Shorty fared in each at-bat for some small-town team in some bygone league, that Shorty’s parents were married by a priest who just so happens to be the namesake of Kula’s church and even where Shorty was buried back in Michigan.
Kula had a Mount Olivet Cemetery worker snap a photo of Shorty’s headstone.
“To me, that was pretty close,” Kula quipped. “The picture of him was only a few feet away.”
Kula checked with the Guardians and with the Baseball Hall of Fame. He pored over census data and scoured ancestry sites and filled a green folder with stacks of box score printouts and letters he wrote to fellow Gallaghers in the Detroit area.
One person with that surname who belonged to Shorty’s church reviewed his family tree and identified several relatives named Charles, but none with William as a middle name, or with ties to Detroit.
I hope that you find Charles somewhere. However, I cannot help you with your quest.
In his youth, Kula’s religion was Cleveland baseball. In the ’70s and ’80s, every spring, perhaps against his better judgment, Kula held out hope that the bumbling franchise would find its way. Kula holds fond memories of late Cleveland sports radio personality Pete Franklin hyping up Indians prospects before another season of disappointment took root.
That made this the perfect project, and the pursuit of Shorty so enthralling. When an email response hit his inbox or when he retrieved a written letter from his mailbox, a fleeting spark of hope followed.
“Hopeful,” he said, “and then bummed out.”
Passion blurred with compulsion. Eventually, it became an all-consuming assignment.
He waited for the clock to strike 5 p.m. at his job developing computer software and then raced home to execute the next search mission. When he couldn’t think up a new plan, he retraced previous steps, just in case he overlooked something.
There was no guarantee he would reach a satisfying resolution, and that created a mystique about the entire operation. If no newspaper had a photo of Shorty, and if he didn’t have a family, the empty pocket in the middle of the top row on the second page of his binder — in between Charles “Truck” Eagan and Frank Genins — might forever remain vacant.
Over time, his confidence waned. He willed himself to revisit his progress only every couple of months, to flip through an old newspaper issue he had already visited, to scrape even further into the Google abyss.
Shorty, once beguiling, had turned torturous.
“I got to the point,” Kula said, “where I was like, ‘Yeah, this ain’t gonna happen.’”
For the last 10 years, Justin McKinney has worked with the SABR Pictorial History Research Committee to locate a photo of every major-leaguer since 1871. The catalog contains about 96 percent of the players who have appeared in a game, with as robust of a biography for each individual as the researchers can construct.
Like Kula, McKinney is drawn to the chase. He once searched for a player from the 1880s, combing through every newspaper issue coinciding with a particular season. He found photos of every player on the team — even one player’s dog — but not the one player he needed.
“Sometimes you have to laugh,” he said.
Shorty stood out to McKinney, especially once he read about Kula’s pursuit. Given Shorty’s travels from one minor-league outfit to another, one city to another, even to McKinney’s native Canada, there had to be a photo somewhere. McKinney compiled notes on Shorty from 1891 to 1920, a 20-year period in which he was tied to baseball in some fashion. The problem was that Shorty never seemed to stick around long enough to participate in a team photo.
“It felt like he should have been findable,” McKinney said.
The higher the degree of difficulty, the more unfruitful the leads, the more McKinney felt compelled to keep digging. Kula knew the feeling.
“It becomes an obsession,” McKinney said. “The work can still be tedious and frustrating. You have so many close calls.”
McKinney connected with Kula a few years ago. They shared intel and bonded over the wayward paths that poached their time and energy. They could pen a biography of a guy they had never seen.
They knew Shorty’s alternate nickname was Chubby, that he worked as an umpire at one point, that he was never married and didn’t have much family. But they could only guess his facial features.
One mid-January evening, McKinney decided to make a final effort to find Shorty. The New Orleans Times-Picayune had published photos of players throughout the 1902 baseball season for the local minor-league affiliate, the Pelicans. McKinney, like Kula, had pored through the pages a bunch of times. He knew Shorty’s timeline with the Pelicans — when he joined the club, when he moved on, when he appeared in 16 games.
No photo, though.
The day Shorty joined the team, another player joined, too: Adam Vogt. McKinney had learned that old newspapers can be scanned improperly or include typos, so he sometimes had to get creative to account for a mistake. He decided to focus on Vogt, not Gallagher, the more common surname. If he searched Vogt’s name, perhaps something would turn up.
Sure enough, he searched for Vogt and found a photo. And right beside it was a photo of Shorty — only, the last name was misspelled, with an “e” in the middle instead of a second “a.”
That explained why he and Kula never discovered it. Shorty wasn’t in the lineup that day, so his name was absent from the box score on the page. The only mention of him included a typo. Anyone searching for Shorty Gallagher would have come up empty.
“There’s a skill of being creative and to look for different things in different ways and be persistent,” McKinney said. “But you still have to have luck.”
McKinney’s Facebook message to Kula jolted him out of his late-night malaise. There, after all this time, was a blurry, black-and-white image of a guy with an icy glare, a guy who looked indignant about being discovered.
Kula rushed upstairs to rattle awake his wife, the first time he caused such a disruption since his Indians tied the Cubs in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series on an improbable Rajai Davis home run.
“It’s like a religious experience when you find someone like that,” McKinney said, “when you find someone who you’ve been looking for for so long. It’s like an epiphany. It feels as good as any feeling in the world I’ve ever had.”
For years, the journey kept Kula stirring. He even pondered at points whether he actually wanted it to end, to shut the door on a venture that provided him such a rush.
The longer it dragged out, though, he said, “I realized I did want it to end.” When it started to seem unattainable, the process itself became tiresome. And then McKinney delivered the goods.
“I could finally exhale,” Kula said.
Kula had interacted with two other people who were hunting for Shorty over the course of his search. Clarence “Lefty” Blasco died in 2012. Chris Rainey died in 2021. To Randy, the gulps of Conway’s Irish Ale were a toast to them and to McKinney for the assist.
Kula created a Shorty card with his 3D printer, adding a blue border with “Cleveland Blues” atop the photo. He opened his binder to the second page.
“That spot’s been empty for a long time,” he said.
Kula joked that now he needs to start collecting something else, something to fill the void. He’s not sure what, though.
Shorty had a spell on him.
“I was probably pretty crazy for trying to do this,” Kula said. “What makes us think we could still find him at this point, 125 years after he played his only two games in the majors? Why did we think we were going to find him?
“Well, because he was out there. He needed to be found.”
