A glimpse into the nightmare that is identification.

Last week, I photographed a baseball game between Newbury Park High School and Moorpark High School. I took some nice shots of the NP pitcher, which I am planning on submitting for this week. If you don't work in newspapers, you might not know the absolute nightmare that is trying to identify athletes. It should be simple. Each player should have clearly visible numbers on their uniform, which correspond with the roster. But it's never that simple. 
The photograph I have shows the pitcher in mid-throw, the ball headed toward home. He's bent over, his arm extended, uniform crinkled, no number visible. 
First I check the roster to see if the pitcher is identified. It's signified by a number "1" or a "P" under the position column. I see no number one, and the column is smudged with inkblots covering multiple numbers. No such luck. Worse, the row with a hand-drawn divider, listing two players for the same position - a likely listing for "pitcher" - shows two names with numbers that don't match up for the second pitcher. So I can't be sure this roster is even reliable.
So I move on to the next method. I always save every single frame I shoot from any athletic event, because inevitably you will need the throwaway frames for identification help. Here, I should have been able to flip a few frames forward to the shot where he is bent over, arms down, after the throw, exposing the big number and name on the back of his uniform. 
Except this player is a lefty, not a righty. So he is bent over, but his back is facing away from me. No luck there either.
Most athletic uniforms have numbers on both the front and the back. In photos of his teammates, their jerseys have the team name, "Panthers" on the front, and a number below. But he's wearing a slightly different jersey. No numbers on the front at all. Again, no luck.
I shoot from multiple angles for each game, and I usually have photos of the pitcher from different angles. One of them is bound to show his number. Except that they switched him out for a different pitcher before I moved to the other side, where his back number would have been visible. No luck.
Occasionally a player is identifiable by his shoes and uniform quirks - socks lower than his teammates, labels or stripes on socks, patterns on shoes, even shoelaces. So even if I have two players that look identical from the back (meaning I can't use their face or front of uniform to identify them) I can distinguish them by their footwear. But many other players have similar shoes and socks. No luck.

My last resort is to move to outside sources. I check Maxpreps, a high school athletics website, to see if these players are pictured there and I can use those shots to help me. But it's off-season. These kids aren't listed anywhere yet! 
I look for Newbury Park's baseball website. The link from their school website is broken, leading me to a dead end. Finally, using Google, I locate the new baseball site. And fortunately, they have a 2009 roster listed. With pitch/throw listings! Two players throw left-handed. One is an outfielder, and I have another photo from the front of the same pitcher in the outfield. 
So I cross-reference this roster with my roster from the game. The lefty thrower from the online roster matches to a player in the game I shot, one of the guys with a smudge over his position. Bingo. 
Sometimes you can never identify the player, and the shot goes into the trash can. This time, with a little extra work and a little luck, I saved it.