Bleached Baseball Nicknames
The Changing Landscape of Baseball Nicknames - Norman L. Macht
Where have all the colorful ballplayers’ nicknames gone?
There was as much poetry in Hillbilly Bildilli, Still Bill Hill, Sad Sam Jones, Pretzels Pezzullo and Kiki Cuyler as in a verse by Longfellow.
Baseball player Sad Sam Jones
Baseball Nicknames Back in the Day
Food used to be a fertile source for colorful sobriquets. There was Spud and Cookie and Peanuts and Beans and Pepper and the Tabasco Kid.
It’s all been leached from the game, leaving it poorer and blander. You can’t even find a southpaw pitcher today who’s known as “Lefty.”
Maybe affluence has something to do with it. There’s something undignified about calling a millionaire “Rube” even if he is one.
It seems as out of place as crushing crackers into your soup at the Ritz. Today’s players take themselves too seriously for appellations like Babe and Rabbit and Mule and Tex.
Whoever heard of bankers and business moguls having nicknames? Would anyone dare to call J. P. Morgan Pee Wee?
Why not revive the descriptive label “Highpockets” for an elongated hurler? Isn’t anybody Gabby or Happy anymore? Is it too brutish to refer to an overweight DH as Jumbo or Chubby or Fats?
Maybe it’s a sign of the PCing of society. But there must be some nicknames that could elude being branded with the big I for insensitive.
The moniker Lucky is about the only tag that is no longer appropriate for any individual player. Every man in the big leagues qualifies for that one.
These days the only place you see nicknames is in the Baseball Hall of Fame, of all places.
Scores of players who have been chosen for the game’s highest honor were known so indelibly by their nicknames that that’s the way they have been enshrined instead of by their given names. And they didn’t object.
Check out more articles from Norman L. Macht on our dedicated baseball blog
Can you identify these Hall of Famers by their real names?
Lefty Grove
Sparky Anderson
Chief Bender
Three-Finger Brown
Mickey Cochrane
Whitey Ford
Lefty Gomez
Goose Goslin
Goose Gossage
Gabby Hartnett
Whitey Herzog
Catfish Hunter
Chipper Jones
Pee Wee Reese
Red Schoendienst
Duke Snider
Arky Vaughan
Pie Traynor
Hack Wilson
For the answers, go to baseballhall.org. Take our Hall of Fame baseball nicknames quiz for more!
