Hall of Name: Baseball's Most Magnificent Monikers from 'The Only Nolan' to 'Van Lingle Mungo' and More

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)

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.

JAYSON STARK is the 2019 winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for meritorious contributions to baseball writing and was presented with the award in Cooperstown during the Hall of Fame's annual induction weekend. In addition to his work at MLB Network, he is also a senior baseball writer at The Athletic and the host of Baseball Stories on Stadium TV. In his profile on the Hall of Fame's website following the Spink Award announcement, Stark was described as a curator for all things weird, wacky, unique, statistically inclined and historically rare in the game. His popular Useless Information column at the Athletic is a regular collection of notes, quotes, numbers, oddities and laughs. And in his previous stops at ESPN.com and the Philadelphia Inquirer, he was the creator and author of the nationally syndicated Baseball Week in Review column, which looked at the sport in a similar irreverent vein. Stark spent 17 years covering baseball for ESPN and ESPN.com. Besides writing columns for the website, he made numerous television appearances on Baseball Tonight, SportsCenter and Outside the Lines, and won an Emmy for his work on Baseball Tonight. He was also a regular guest on Mike and Mike, where he contributed his famous weekly trivia question. Stark previously spent 21 years covering baseball for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was twice named Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year. He appears regularly on radio stations around the country and formerly hosted The Jayson Stark Show on 97.5 The Fanatic in Philadelphia. He is the author of three books, Wild Pitches: Rumblings, Grumblings and Reflections on the Game I Love (Triumph Books, 2014), The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History (Triumph Books, 2006) and Worth The Wait: Tales of the 2008 Phillies (Triumph Books, 2009). In May of 2017, he was inducted into the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He is a finalist for the 2019 National Sports Media Association's national-sportswriter-of-the-year award. He also appeared in the 2014 film, Million Dollar Arm, starring Jon Hamm. And in 2018, Topps issued an actual Jayson Stark baseball card.

TIM GODDEN is an illustrator based in north Devon, England, where he lives with his wife and son. He specializes in historical and sports illustration, with a focus on baseball, football and WWI. His work has been exhibited internationally and has featured on book and program covers. In 2018 he illustrated Percy, based on the letters of a young soldier who went to fight in the WWI. Aside from illustration, Tim has just completed a PhD in Architecture and spends an unhealthy amount of time watching baseball in the small hours of the night.