Photo by Steven Branscombe-USA TODAY Sports
In so many ways, at so many moments, modern life makes it difficult for us to express ourselves. There are social rules and mores and the various pressures they bring to bear, but mostly there is the uncertainty of it all—the increasingly unmissable sense of living on a knife edge, an anxious sense of a long drop below. We are not wrong to perceive this risk, or wrong to fear it. Things fall apart all around while we debate precisely the wrong things; the oceans rise and the government dithers and preens, a legion of avaricious predators tries the locks 24/7. And still, hearteningly, Americans are giving their children crazy-ass names.You'll have to squint a little to see it, but there is something heroic about this. We should be a nation of hunkered-down, battened-hatches Johns and Marys, but people are still naming their children unique and strange things for reasons aspirational and sentimental and religious and otherwise individual and distinct to them. Certain styles of name are distinct to certain types of people from certain walks of life, and to the places in which they live. This is how we wind up with a nation of college lacrosse players with names like Phipps and Boater. And it is why, even in the comparatively lockstep and strikingly homogenous world of college baseball—increasingly and somewhat worryingly white, affluent, and increasingly played by people from the same five or six states—there are still some spectacular names to be found.COLLEGE BASEBALL NAMES: REAL OR NAH1) Gunner Dadds2) Scotland Church3) Skye Bolt4) Kale Beach5) Hunter Gathers6) Parker Bugg7) Dipper Flubbs8) Copper Guntt9) John Henry Styles10) Branch Weathers11) Brock Deatherage12) Canaan Cropper13) Braiser Tibbs14) Boomer Biegalski15) Homer Dingman16) Parker Wormsley17) Hunter Hagler18) Kole Damper19) Randy Travis Meals20) Morgan Bunting21) Logan Bone22) Kirby Bellow23) Carper Nubb24) Dallas HoustonActual College Baseball Names: 2, 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22,
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While these are recognizably Baseball Names, they are also and simultaneously little literary miracles. Now, it is a statistical fact that three out of every ten college baseball players at this moment in time is named either Hunter or Brock, and that is a little upsetting. But despite the strictures of culture and style, even under all the pressures of life in these times and these United States, there are still some good-as-hell names on college baseball rosters. I have gone through those rosters and chosen some of my favorite names. Then I made up some goofy fake names that I thought sounded somewhat similar. Your task is to differentiate the fake names from the real ones; the answers are below.
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