You can call it what you want, but I call it messin’ with The Kid

When I play ball, most of my teammates call me Ronnie. When I was in college, they called me Kap, a take-off on my name coupled with the Kangolish-type of headgear I always wore (at camp in the Laurentian Mountains, they called me Casquette for the same reason).

When I look for those literary birthday greetings, I often find the farther back in time I go, the better the nickname.

Players today rarely have the same colorful appellations as their predecessors, and that’s a shame.

Quoted at length from The Great American Novel, by Philip Roth:

Nickname Damur (TR, BR, 5′, 92 lbs.) could run the ninety feet from home to first in 3.4 seconds, and that was about it. At fourteen he was the youngest player in the majors, as well as the skinniest. The joke was (or was it a joke?) that the Mundy brothers were paying him by the pound; not that the boy cared anything about money anyway-no, all he seemed to think about from the moment he joined the team in spring training, was making a nickname for himself. “How about Hank?” he asked his new teammates his very first day in the scarlet and white, “don’t I look like a Hank to you guys?” He was so green they had to sit him down and explain to him that Hank was the nickname for Henry. “Is that your name, boy–Henry?” “Nope. It’s worse. . . Hey, how about Dutch? Dutch Damur. It rhymes!” “Dutch is for Dutchmen, knucklhead.” “Chief?” “For Injuns.” “Whitey?” “For blonds.” “How about Ohio then, where I’m from?” “That ain’t a name.” “Hey-how about Happy? Which I sure am, bein’ here with you all!” “Don’t worry, you won’t be for long.” “Well, then,” he said shyly, “given my incredible speed and all, how about Twinkletoes? Or Lightning? Or Flash!” “Don’t boast, it ain’t becomin’. We wuz all fast once’t. So was everybody in the world. That don’t make you special one bit.” “Hey! How about Dusty? That rhymes too!”

But even when he himself had settled upon the nickname he wouldn’t have minded seeing printed beneath his picture on a bubble gum card, or hearing announced over the loudspeaker when he stepped up to bat, his teammates refused to address him by it. Mostly, in the beginning, they did not address him at all if they could help it, but just sort of pushed him aside to get where the were going or walked right through him as if he weren’t there. A fourteen-year-old kid weight ninety-two pounds playing in the infield! “What next?” they said, spitting on the dougout steps in disgust, “a reindeer or a slit?” In the meantime, Damur begin tugging at his cap every two minutes, hoping they would notice and start calling him Cappy; he took to talking as though he had been born on a farm, saying “hoss” for horse and  calling the infield “the pea patch,” expecting they would shortly start calling him Rube; suddenly he began running out to his position in the oddest damn way –“What the hell you doin’, biy?” they asked. “That’s just the way I walk,” he replied, “like a duck.” But no one took the hint and called him Duckly or Goose. Nor when he chattered encouragement to the pitcher did they think to nickname him Gabby. “Shut up with that noise, willya?” cried the pitcher–“You’re driving me batty,” and so that was the end of that. Finally, in desperation, he whined, “Jee-zuz! What about Kid at least?” “We already got a Kid on this club. Two’s confusin’.” “But he’s fifty years old and losin’ his teeth!” cried Damur. “I’m only fourteen. I am a kid.” “Tough. He wuz here before you wuz even born.”

It was Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, the Mundy peacemaker and Sunday manager, who christened him Nickname. Not that Damur was happy about it, as surely he would have been, dubbed Happy. “‘Nickname’ isn’t a nickname, it’s the name for a nickname. Hey–how about Nick? That’s the nickname for nickname. Call me Nick, guys!” “Nick? That’s for Greeks. You aint’ Greek.” “But whoever heard of a baseball player called Nickname Damur?” “And who ever heard a’ one that weighed nintey-two pounds and could not endorse a razor blade if they even asked him to?”

Indeed, so slight was he, that on opening day of the ’43 season, a base runner barreling into second knocked Nickname so high and so far that the center-fielder, Roland Agni, came charging in to make a sensational diving two-handed catch of the boy. “Out!” roared the field umpire, until he rememdbered that of course it is the ball not the player that has to be caught, and instantly reversed his decision. The fans, however, got a kick out of seeing Nickname flying this way and that, and when he came to bat would playfully call out to him, “How about Tarzan? How about Gargantua?” and the opposing team had their fun too, needling him from the bench–“How about Powerhouse? How about Hurricane? How about Hercules, Nickname?” At last the diminitive second-sacker couldn’t take any more. “Stop it,” he cried, “stop, please,” and with tears running down his face, pleaded with his tormentors, “My name is Oliver!” But, alas, it was too late for that.

Nickname, obviously, had no business in the majors, not even as a pinch-runner. Oh, he was swift enough, but hardly man enough, and if it was not for the wartime emergency, and the irrresponsibility of the Mundy brothers, he would have been home where he belonged, with his long division and his mom. “How about Homesick?” the sportswriter Smitty whispered into the boy’s ear, a month after the ’43 season began, and Nickname, black and blue by now and batting less than his own weight, threw himswelf in a rage upon the famous columnist. But what began with a flurry of fists ended with the boy sobbing in Smity’s lap, in a  wing chair in a corner of the lobby of the Grand Kakoola Hotel. The next day, Smitty’s column began, “A big leaguer wept yesterday, cried his heart out like a kid, but only a fool would call him a sissy…”

Thereafter fans left off teasing Nickname about his size and his age and his name, and for awhile (until the catastrophe at Kakoola) he became  mascot to the crowds. Of course, being babied was the last thing he wanted (so he thought) and so under the professional guidance of Big John Baal, he took to the booze, and, soon enough, to consorting with whores. They called him whatever he wanted them to. In sleazy cathouses around the league they called him just about evefy famous ballplayer’s nickname under the sun–all he had to to do was ask, and pay. They called him Babe, Nap, Christy, Shoeless, Dizzy, Heinie, Tony, Home Run, Cap, Rip, Kiki, Luke, Pepper, and Irish; they called him Cracker and Country and King Kong and Pie; they even called him Lefty, skinny little fourteen-year-old second baseman that he was. Why not? It only cost and extra buck, and it made him feel like soebody important.

Whew.

All that said, here are a few books on the topic:

• Baseball Nicknames: A Dictionary of Origins and Meanings, by John Skipper
• Having Fun with Baseball Nicknames, by Phil Blazovich
• From Abba-Dabba to Zorro: The World of Baseball Nicknames, by Don Zminda

Tagged as: baseball fiction, baseball nicknames, Philip Roth