El Hombre and The Flying Hawaiian Vs Those Other Guys

In professional sports fans often express their admiration of a player by christening them with a nickname. In the case of great players or really awesome nicknames, the moniker takes on a power of its own. It becomes so interchangeable; the player’s real given name doesn’t even have to be mentioned for everyone to know exactly who is being discussed. Take for instants these historical nicknames, The Great Bambino, Pistol Pete and Broadway Joe. If you are a sports fan and even if you are not, you probably know exactly who I am referring to.

The current arena of nicknames has become unfortunately bland. The quality of nicknames is unevenly distributed, with one of the major sports leagues being far superior to the others. Both the NBA’s and the NFL’s nicknames have become stale or non-existent. The most common nickname style in the NBA is the simple and boring first initial last initial combo. AI, KG, and KD are some examples. Another common twist on this is the first initial part of last name. Take for example D-wade, T-mac, and J-kidd. While in the NFL nicknames have gone the way of the Oilers.

As you might have guessed that leaves MLB as the one sports league that I know enough about to consider in this post (sorry hockey but the only nickname I know is The Great One and he retired). This declaration that MLB has the best nicknames might come as a surprise to those of you that only watch FSN and the Mariner’s Broadcast team as you probably thought every player’s nickname was simply their last name with a Y at the end. However, the rest of baseball is full of great nicknames. So to honor America’s past times creative powers I have composed a list of my favorite.

Alexei “The Cuban Missile” Ramirez
Joakim “The Mexicutioner” Soria
Franklin “Death to Flying Things” Gutierrez
Vladimir “Vlad the Impaler” Guerrero
Shane “The Flyin' Hawaiian” Victorino

Sources: Statmaster.com