When my family moved to the Kansas City area when I was in elementary school, I wasn’t yet a Royals fan. But as an avid reader of the Saturday sports section and watcher of Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter, I was a fan of a few players. One of them was towering left-handed pitcher Randy Johnson—The Big Unit.
One of my earliest memories of Kauffman Stadium was therefore watching The Big Unit pitch for the Arizona Diamondbacks. That day, I picked up a purple Diamondbacks hat and witnessed Johnson strike out 11 Royals across seven innings of work. The Big Unit would go on to win the World Series and become co-World Series MVP that year, eventually getting inducted into the Hall of Fame. His mound presence and nickname were part of his lore.
Johnson wasn’t the only recent player with a notable nickname. His Seattle teammate, Ken Griffey Jr., was widely known as The Kid. Frank Thomas, longtime White Sox slugger, was known as The Big Hurt. Cal Ripken Jr. was Iron Man. Ivan Rodriguez was known as Pudge. These were some of the most important players of their time.
The most important players of our time, though? They lack nicknames. Shohei Ohtani is the best baseball player on the planet and arguably the most famous living Japanese person. Does he have a nickname? Not really, at least not one anybody can agree on. What about two-time reigning MVP Aaron Judge? His Baseball-Reference page lists four nicknames, none of which are any good.
This is not to say that the art of the baseball nickname is completely lost. Players of particular skill or who have unusual body types tend to have better nicknames. Cal Raleigh carries the torch for best nickname in MLB as Big Dumper. Royals fans affectionately called Billy Butler Country Breakfast. Pete Alonso as The Polar Bear is pretty good.
But it sure seems to me like a lot of the good nicknames sort of petered out in the 2010s. It feels like the most menacing pitchers whose careers began in the aughts whose careers are coming to a close or recently came to a close—Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke, etc.—would have had fearsome nicknames.
This might be recency bias. It may be because I’m not tuned into whatever the young folk are talking about. I dunno. Still, I feel like nicknames are becoming a little bit of a lost art, if only because of their fragmentation. Players can be called a million things on social media, and consensus seems impossible, and simplicity often wins out.
Case in point: Jac Caglianone may have a long way to go before reaching the dizzying heights of many names in this article, but he’s a big guy with a big swing and a big potential for nicknames. In his debut press conference, I asked him what his favorite nickname was. He smiled sort of sheepishly and said that he was a simple guy: “just Cags,” he said.
Now, humility is well and good, and adopting a ridiculous name before stepping foot onto an MLB field is hubris. I just hope that we can reassess in the future, you know? Nicknames are part of what makes sports fun, and I just want more of that.
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