In so many ways, at so many moments, modern life makes it difficult for us to express ourselves. There are social rules and mores and the various pressures they bring to bear, but mostly there is the uncertainty of it all—the increasingly unmissable sense of living on a knife edge, an anxious sense of a long drop below. We are not wrong to perceive this risk, or wrong to fear it. Things fall apart all around while we debate precisely the wrong things; the oceans rise and the government dithers and preens, a legion of avaricious predators tries the locks 24/7. And still, hearteningly, Americans are giving their children crazy-ass names.
You'll have to squint a little to see it, but there is something heroic about this. We should be a nation of hunkered-down, battened-hatches Johns and Marys, but people are still naming their children unique and strange things for reasons aspirational and sentimental and religious and otherwise individual and distinct to them. Certain styles of name are distinct to certain types of people from certain walks of life, and to the places in which they live. This is how we wind up with a nation of college lacrosse players with names like Phipps and Boater. And it is why, even in the comparatively lockstep and strikingly homogenous world of college baseball—increasingly and somewhat worryingly white, affluent, and increasingly played by people from the same five or six states—there are still some spectacular names to be found.
While these are recognizably Baseball Names, they are also and simultaneously little literary miracles. Now, it is a statistical fact that three out of every ten college baseball players at this moment in time is named either Hunter or Brock, and that is a little upsetting. But despite the strictures of culture and style, even under all the pressures of life in these times and these United States, there are still some good-as-hell names on college baseball rosters. I have gone through those rosters and chosen some of my favorite names. Then I made up some goofy fake names that I thought sounded somewhat similar. Your task is to differentiate the fake names from the real ones; the answers are below.
Left to Right: Scooper, Cooper, Hunter, Brock, Brock, Gunner, Colt, Brock, Hunter. Jumping: Hunter. — Steven Branscombe-USA TODAY Sports
COLLEGE BASEBALL NAMES: REAL OR NAH
1) Gunner Dadds
2) Scotland Church
3) Skye Bolt
4) Kale Beach
5) Hunter Gathers
6) Parker Bugg
7) Dipper Flubbs
8) Copper Guntt
9) John Henry Styles
10) Branch Weathers
11) Brock Deatherage
12) Canaan Cropper
13) Braiser Tibbs
14) Boomer Biegalski
15) Homer Dingman
16) Parker Wormsley
17) Hunter Hagler
18) Kole Damper
19) Randy Travis Meals
20) Morgan Bunting
21) Logan Bone
22) Kirby Bellow
23) Carper Nubb
24) Dallas Houston
Actual College Baseball Names: 2, 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22,