Hall of Name
Baseball's Most Magnificent Monikers from 'The Only Nolan' to 'Van Lingle Mungo' and More
1st Edition
Published on 17. March 2020
326 pages
978-1-7341674-1-2 (ISBN)
Description
Paying homage to some of the great "names" in the history of this great game.
Each player profile within has the following:
- general demographic information (name they played under, their full name at birth, date of birth/death, years active in the majors, positions played, etc.)
- etymology/definition of each part of their given name
- baseball biography (generally, how they made it to the majors, what they did while they were there)
- best day (a recap of a great day in their major league career)
- the wonder of his name (why his name is memorable)
- not to be confused with (names that sound and/or look like the player's name)
- fun anagrams (anagrams of their given names, just because)
- ephemera (factoids, tidbits, trivia about the player, details regarding their parents, their family and their life after baseball)
More details
Person
By day, D.B. FIRSTMAN is a Data Analyst for the City of New York, crunching large datasets using SPSS and Excel. They have been a member of SABR off and on since the late 1980s. Besides their own baseball blog (Value Over Replacement Grit), their work has appeared at ESPN.com, Bronx Banter, Baseball Prospectus, The Hardball Times, and in The Village Voice. Their research on the origins of the "Three True Outcomes" in baseball (home runs, strikeouts, and bases on balls) was included in the Spring 2018 edition of the SABR Baseball Research Journal, and their poster presentation on the subject won an award at that year's national convention. They live in Queens, New York.
Content
The names profiled here are divided into four groups (admittedly a few of these players could qualify for more than one category):
- Baseball Poets/Men of (Few Different) Letters: Players with rhyming names and/or alliterative names.
- Dirty Names Done Dirt Cheap: Players with scatological or otherwise naughty names.
- Sounds Good to Me: Players with mellifluous/melodious names.
- No Focus Group Convened: Players whose names don't fall into one of the prior three categories, or ones that might involve us questioning the intentions of the player's parents.
