McCarthy mystery men #3: Keith Luncitenback UPDATE: It's Keith Graffagnini

As I work my way through the 600+ baseball player photographs that I recently purchased from the estate of Detroit photographer James D. McCarthy I have encountered a few that have thus far defied my attempts to properly identify them.

Please see my posting of Sept. 20 for background and the details of my efforts to identify these mystery players.

In this installment of the blog, I'm going to share with you the picture of another of the McCarthy mystery men and solicit your input.

The player is question is in a Houston Astros uniform and is identified as Keith Luncitenback. 

From the format of the photo, it looks like something McCarthy shot in the mid-to-late 1960s, or very early 1970s. The uniform seems to be the Astros road togs used 1965-70. The bat in the photo pegs him as a position player, rather than a pitcher. 

As you can imaging, with a name like Luncitenback, there weren't many alternate spellings to run through; regardless I had no success. Google wouldn't even give ma a hit on that name.

If you can provide concrete identification, or even a good guess, please email me at scbcguy@yahoo.com and maybe together we can figure out who this Minnesota mystery man might be.

UPDATE:

Several readers, the first being Jason Pressley and Eric Loy, have identified the player as Keith Graffagnini. It's quite an alphabetical stretch from Luncitenback to Graffagnini; congratulation to those who made the connection.

You can find his minor league career record here:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=graffa001kei

Graffagnini never played in the majors. He was murdered on Aug. 19, 1978 while driving a newspaper delivery truck for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.