Quote:
Originally Posted by joefromchicago
I assumed that I would not have to explain the difference between a first name and a last name.
I might have been mistaken.
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Yeah, I'd been thinking too if I needed to explain the difference between a given name and a nickname that became commonly used in place of a given name... you know like Babe instead of George, Cy instead of Denton, Lefty instead of Robert, The Only instead of Ed, Satchel instead of Leroy, Rube instead of George... It was pretty common and I don't think baseball in the early 20th century feels right without having some of those. Which is sort of the point of Leech. And speaking of which (and to elevate the discussion a bit) I stumbled over this article recently...
http://research.sabr.org/journals/an...ball-nicknames
It's interesting how the use of baseball nicknames plunges starting around 1950. This article though doesn't differentiate between Nicknames-as-first-names (like Babe Ruth) vs. the nicknames-in-quotes that we're used to in OOTP e.g. Babe "Sultan of Swat" Ruth. You never hear "here comes Sultan of Swat Ruth" but you do hear "there's Babe Ruth". I expect people only very rarely said "oh, there's George Ruth"