It's April Fool's Day

Friday, April 01 2005 @ 12:01 AM EST

This is an interactive Hall of Names -- something we did once before with the controversial attempt to build an All-Top-40-Hits team -- which means your contributions are required.

We're looking to build a team full of players with the goofiest names in baseball history. That could mean a lot of things .. .

... including, for instance:

• It could be one of the 42 players, including the title character, mentioned in the classic baseball song "Van Lingle Mungo". Or anyone like that -- guys like Biff Pocoroba and Bill Nahorodny post-dated the Mungo tune, but surely not all the names we can come up with are catchers.
• It could be, for those of us who want to regress to fourth grade or so, a player whose name is an easy punchline, like (everyone, all together now) former Red Sox reliever Dick Pole. (There, now you don't have to make the joke yourself.)
• It could be someone who has a funny name in the ironic sense, in that it is shared with someone or something better known outside of baseball -- say, Howard Johnson or his former NYM minor league teammate, Ronald McDonald (no kidding).

As usual, we'll shoot for a 25-man roster: nine starting players (including a DH), five starting pitchers (preferably RLRLX) and a five-man bullpen (CL, RH-SET, LH-SET, LOOGY, RH-LONG, LH-LONG) and a bench (C, COR IF, MID IF, OF, OF, PH/DH).

So there we are. Fire away with your favorite names ... and be sure to share the joke behind each one, in case it's not "Dick Pole" obvious.

21 comments

https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20050330235006971