COLUMN: What’s in a name? Research, baseball history and fun

Does the name Chuck Klein ring a bell for any of you guys?

I doubt it. And that sentiment doesn’t come from a pretentious place, either. I had no idea who the man was myself until last week. But his name came up twice, improbably, in two different contexts. 

The first time I saw the name Chuck Klein was in an article about Shohei Ohtani.

If you keep track of sports, and probably even if you don’t, you’ve heard that name before.

Ohtani recently finished his chase for 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases, an accomplishment I’d be remiss not to mention as a fervent baseball fan. Of course, countless articles hit the web as soon as the all-world player hit the plateau.

Babe Ruth, another iconic name that conjures images of a different era — not to mention the charming signed baseball Macguffin from The Sandlot — came up a lot. Ohtani’s performance in recent seasons and 2024 certainly warrants the comparison.

One article I read performed the classic baseball cherry-picking, grouping Ohtani’s different season statistics with other historic seasons to create a variety of “clubs” for him to inhabit. 

The groups revolved around everything from slugging percentage to RBI totals, though it’s obviously pretty easy to make Ohtani’s season stand out regardless of what metrics you use. It’s been an all-time great hitting season, even if he’s only been a DH and not a fielder (or pitcher, for that matter).

I recognized most names. Legends of the game littered the copy: Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial. Then there was Chuck Klein.

I’m fascinated with baseball history, yet had never heard of Klein. He wasn’t a nobody by any means, as he won the National League MVP Award in 1932. The reason he popped up on the Ohtani list was because of his combo of speed and power in that MVP season — he led the league in both homers (38) and stolen bases (20)!

Obviously the season failed to shatter any huge records, impressive as it was. If it had, we’d all know about it. Probably. But it’s a great season, and Chuck Klein is a great name as a result, in my opinion.

It’s a baseball name, one of thousands that go unremembered on a daily basis by most despite a great accomplishment. It’s a baseball name, just like Honus Wagner, Mickey Mantle, Barry Bonds and Orel Hershiser are all baseball names.

As much as Chuck Klein is a “baseball name,” monikers like Roger Craig, Randy Johnson and Will Smith are decidedly not baseball names, despite the fact that they belong to ballplayers. Randy Johnson may be the greatest southpaw who ever lived, but his name still doesn’t scream “baseball” to me, for whatever reason.

The name (ha) of this column is more than a Shins song title. It’s a question I don’t really know the answer to, and I don’t intend to answer it here. I will, however, lay out how names open gateways to sports history in a way few other bits of trivia can.

The Melody’s community reporter Evelyn Davidson affectionately and comically calls some of our articles “soup” — typically columns, these stories nurture the soul, feel a little warm and fuzzy. My column ain’t soup this week, I fear, but maybe it’s a box of crackerjack instead.

Googling it

When I hear a name I don’t know, I look it up almost every time, especially when it comes to sports.

That’s how I found myself typing John Carroll into my search bar the other day. That’s a university in Ohio, not a person, but it’s also the football team that, all the way back in 1931, tied the Mercer Bears on a Thursday in October.

That tie against the Blue Streaks, as they’re known now, at least, gave the Bears a 4-0-1 record through five games. That 1931 year was, until Saturday afternoon, Mercer’s best beginning to a football season in school history.

John Carroll plays at the Division III level now, but I still had fun learning what the school was and reading up on that 1931 Mercer season, just a year before Klein won MVP. It also led me to learn that the Bears conquered my Clemson Tigers multiple times back when they first played football before World War II.

I was a little less pleased to learn that “fun” fact, but amused nonetheless.

Another example of great names came at this week’s iteration of the Macon Touchdown Club, where former Southern Cal coach and current Georgia Southern coach Clay Helton spoke.

Helton was surprisingly charming and earnest — I knew embarrassingly little about him going in, only that he’d gotten the boot at USC and that he’d found some decent success so far with the Eagles in Statesboro.

I didn’t think too hard about Helton or his experience beforehand, but loved hearing him talk about another great moniker: JuJu Smith-Schuster. 

What an awesome name, right? And, for a bit, JuJu was a dominant force as an NFL widereceiver in Pittsburgh. Helton coached Smith-Schuster at USC and brought up the former Trojan wideout when a club member mentioned prodigal Alabama wide receiver Ryan Williams and his incredible performance against Georgia last weekend.

“When I coached JuJu, he was a kid in a grown man’s body, he had that athletic ability,” Helton told the audience. “He was young, like that ‘Bama kid… but so talented.”

I hadn’t even registered Helton’s time at USC crossing over with Smith-Schuster’s, nor had I thought of JuJu’s NFL career in a while. I looked him up as well, and voila — he’s still playing! He even caught a touchdown from Patrick Mahomes earlier this year.

Learning old names you’d never heard before is fun, but just as pleasurable is remembering old names you’d forgotten about. It’s why there’s so many jokes about guys sitting in a room together and simply naming ancient, mediocre baseball players together.

Same name, new person

I was hoping the Braves could give us a unique name to remember this postseason. That didn’t happen. In reality, though, there’s already some names I’ll never forget that ordinarily wouldn’t stick in my baseball lexicon.

Ramon Laureano and Gio Urshela, for instance, would have gone by the wayside of my baseball memory had they, the scraps and leftovers from other teams, not been picked up by Atlanta. Those two guys were a big part of the Braves even making the postseason in 2024.

There’s another side to that coin, too.

I never mentioned the second time I saw Chuck Klein’s name pop up unexpectedly last week. It was in a wonderful old Jimmy Breslin piece for Sports Illustrated, a colorful look at the New York Mets’ lousy inaugural season in 1962.

Breslin referenced Klein in the article as an example of a fine hitter, but the focal point of the story is actually a name we all remember as baseball fans: Casey Stengel. Stengel is a legendary manager mostly known for his time leading the Yankees to titles in the 1950s, but he was also at the helm of those ‘62 Mets. 

The piece puts the almost stately legacy of Stengel and those iconic Mantle-led Bronx teams in high contrast. The Mets do not garner Yankees cheers, they elicit groans and hollers from fans with their terrible fielding, weak hitting and incessant losing, but Stengel’s reputation actually improves for how he manages the miserable club.

I know Stengel, as a baseball history fan, for his chatterbox nature and innovative managerial style while he was in New York, as it’s been relayed to me. But there’s more to be found in a name than what you know off the bat. 

Reading quotes from Stengel complaining about the Mets but also ruthlessly defending his players added an extra layer of coolness to his legacy, at least for me.

That article helped me uncover something new in a name, and that’s just plain ol’ fun. 

So, what’s in a name? More than meets the eye or ear, that’s what.