Sports Nicknames

Here's one! Drew Beldsoe much he needed a transfusion?

The Freak (Jevon Kearse)

T.J Freaky Freak (Tim Lincecum, according to the ESPN commercial)

"Brett" Favre; his real name is Steve.

See, this has already gone off the rails because I'm not even sure Big Puma is Berkman's best nickname. (Fat Elvis)

Megatron (Calvin Johnson)
CJ2K (Chris Johnson) think I have heard that on sports center!?

I also really like Kung Fu Panda, fans actually dress as pandas in the stands.

Superfreak - Moss
All Day - Adrian Peterson
Baby Jesus - Joe Mauer

I believe it's Baby Joesus. Or Man-Muscles.

Isn't Mauer "The Natural"?

Francisco Cordero - Coco
Scott Podsednik - Podzilla
Jeff Suppan - Soup

I'll find more when I have time.

The Minister of Defense - Reggie White
El Presidente - Pedro Martinez
The Answer - Alan Iverson
King James - Lebron James
The Franchise - Tim Lincecum
The Hebrew Hammer - Ryan Braun
The Mayor - Sean Casey
Carlos Lee - El Caballo
Sidney Crosby - The Next One

El Caballo is nicknamed "Carlos Lee"? I don't get it.

Yup. Weird, isn't it.

Jeff Suppan - That @#$@$!#$


Not a current player, didn't your grade school teacher ever tell you to read directions?



Really?! It's Allen Iverson.



Aren't there like 50 guys with that nickname? I don't think that really counts. Actually wikipedia lists 7 (not counting the rapper). Looks like Tom Seaver was the original, although I bet Steve Francis is the best well known currently. Liriano, ha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Franchise_%28disambiguation%29

Young Money - Brandon Jennings
Mo - Mariano Rivera (yay for Texas!)
Flash - Dwayne Wade
Black Mamba - Kobe Byrant I think it meets guideline #1, but he did give it to himself so that's kind of weird.
I don't want to break rule #2 so I'll just say that the nickname listed on wikipedia for Donald Driver wasn't what I was expecting to find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Driver Although I'm not sure Double D is much better in that regard. Moving on...
Gooch - Oguchi Onyewu Also random Scrubs shout out for the Gooch

I'll throw out a few more.

The Big Fundamental - Tim Duncan. Kind of a boring nickname, but that's why it's great. It fits. Except for the free throw shooting.

Speaking of free throws, I feel like Shaq's nicknames almost need their own category. I think the best might be the simplist.
Diesel. Also, I think The Big Aristotle is probably the best/most used of his more ridiculous self-imposed nicknames.

As for other players, here's one I don't like, but a lot of people do:
Durantula - Kevin Durant

Also, I'm throwing this out there, even though I have mixed feelings:
Big Papi - David Ortiz. It has staying power.

Since Rule #3 has been thrown out the window, my favorite has always been Baby Jordan....poor Harold Miner

I've never once heard or seen anyone call Liriano "The Franchise"

Fine, Tim Lincecum is the Freaky Franchise.

Yeah, that's ridiculous.
On a side note, I saw Mike "RedDog" "Smell'em" Redmond save "THE Franchise" in St. Louis after Liriano made an errant throw before a game.

Oh Joe.

It was disregarded by some, but I'm holding fast to that one for the moment. The more I try thinking of nicknames on my own, the more I realize how many great nicknames are from former players, even recently retired players. Which is actually why we need to stick to current players. We can't handle the huge scope of all-time nicknames.

I wasn't thinking of Rule #3 when I came up with Reggie White. It just came to me and I wrote it down. My bad. I'll stick to the script from now on.

Really? I've seen him called that quite a few times.

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=liriano+%22the+franchise%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=liriano+%22the+franchise%22&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=499faa430ac3503f

Carnell Lamar "Cadillac" Williams
Adam Pac Man Jones
Alexander Ovechkin - Alexander the Great

The first two here bring up an interesting question. Does it count for the purposes of this poll if the person goes almost 100% by his nickname? I mean, he isn't Carnell the Cadillac Williams. Most people probably don't even know his first name.

I never put it on here, but I had thought about that issue. For me, the people whose nicknames are what they almost always go by maybe aren't really what the spirit of the list is about. However, I was thinking of these to be more along the lines of Tiger Woods. Or Coco Crisp. To me, Cadillac Williams is still more of a nickname than his name. Pacman less so.
Then again, I don't know if I'd want to discount these completely. If we were doing an all-time list, I'd have a hard time not including Magic Johnson, even though it's easily more his name than his actual name. In fact, I'd probably say it's one of the best all-time nicknames. So, to me, it's kind of a case by case thing. The fact that is has become someone's name probably makes the nickname better in some ways and not as good in others. You just have to take it all into account.

By the way, I think I'm going to start an All-time nicknames list in a word document on my computer because I can't help but think of a ton of great ones (no pun intended) but I don't want to muddy this list with all of them right now. But I encourage everyone else to keep track of them too and we can post them later.

Ahh...I'm two minutes in and overwhelmed. So many nicknames! I'm gonna focus on current players and then just write down the ones of old timers I might otherwise forget. We'll probably have to break down the all-time lists by sport, and possibly by era, for it to be manageable at all. But that's for a later date.

I don't want to jump the gun here, but I'll just say that for all-time nicknames I don't think any era can beat the early days of baseball. For instance, "Death to Flying Things", a nickname held by not one, but two players from the very early days of baseball (Jack Chapman and Bob Ferguson).

7,000 results is incredibly weak. You get about half that googling 'Lindgren "the franchise"' and no one has called me that. (Though I think I might insist on it.)

Liriano's nickname is Frankie, generally written with a variable number of Ks while he's pitching.



Because of this post a Cadillac Auction site started following us on twitter.

Do they pay you royalties? If so, that's my contribution. If not, I'll just keep providing witty analysis and commentary free of charge.

It's the quality not the quantity. The first result is that of the Twins beat writer for the Star-Tribune followed by other national sources and some prominent Twins blogs. It may not be widely known, but its the closest he has to an actual nickname. I guess you two just aren't as well informed a Twins fan as I am.

And Frankie is not a nickname, its a shortened version of his actual name (granted it's a little more nicknamey than calling me Matt is in my case, but not much, and if you open that up, then the list would be endless).

FranKKKKKKKKKKie!
(Imagine some of these backwards)

That's racist.

Well, I think a defining characteristic of a nickname is "do people actually call them that." I never made any claim that no one ever on earth had called him "The Franchise," but a couple people calling him something, even "official people," does not a nickname make. Especially since in this case they're all mostly references to what he may or may not have actually been called by someone in 2006.

I imagine someone somewhere has called him "The Dominican Dominator" that doesn't make it a "real" nickname.

I also never claimed Frankie was a worthy-of-this-list nickname, only that that's what his is.

And I'm saying that if Liriano has a nickname, then "The Franchise" would be what it is.



And I'm saying that's not a nickname, worthy-of-this-list or not.

Wait, so is a modification of your original name not an official nickname? Hank Aaron's real name was Henry. But to some or most he went by Hank. I suppose for the purpose of this list it should not be considered a nickname, but is it different than just a shortened version of a name. Chris from Christopher is not that same as Jimmy from James. What about Scotty from Scott?

Right. Matt from Matthew is not a nickname. Matty would be, albeit a rather uncreative one. Though it's definitely not a totally black and white area because of the Charles/Charlie/Chucks and the Richard/Dicks of the world. Jem is the official way of shortening Jeremy, but is used so infrequently one could probably call that a nick name.

Matty G!
And for NutCan purposes:
Matty G P!

Clay "The Claymaker" Matthews