The Offseason

Lately I've been wondering about the prominence of J initials on the 2008 Red Sox team.

Call me a dork, but I love names. I collect names. What I mean by that is, I keep lists of cool names, usually with the pretense of using them some day in a story, but sometimes just because I like the sound or the spelling or whatever.

And lately I can't help wondering at the prominence of J initials on the 2008 Red Sox.

First we have the boys from the Pacific Northwest: Jason, Jon, Jed, and Jacoby (from North to South). These guys have a special place in my heart because of location, and whenever they do good I like to leave messages on facebook about Pacific NW Power and those good old Pacific NW boys. I think from now on I may have to come up with an appropriate and ridiculous nickname for them, for example, The Pac.

While doing a little google study of this group, I came across a Joe Posnanski "What's in a name?" column about Lowrie being possibly the most famous Jed. According to Posnanski, the "Northwest is our leading producer of Jeds".

These internet wanderings naturally got me wondering about all of those other Josh's and Jason's and the like.

When I finally went ahead and looked at the roster, I found 10 players on the 25-man roster whose first names begins with a J: Jason Bay, Josh Beckett, J.D. Drew, Jacoby Ellsbury, Jon Lester, Javier Lopez, Jed Lowrie, Justin Masterson, Jonathan Papelbon, and Jason Varitek.

That's a whopping 40% of the roster. I mean, we have lineups where 5 of our batters' first names begin with J. My scorecards, which always feature the first initial, are peppered with them.

Maybe one day soon I'll have time for a statistical comparison of the prominence of certain initials on Major League Baseball teams. I seem to remember an awful lot of Ds, or Gs, or something, on the Angels...

Because you know. Once the season is over, we have to find some way to while away our time while we wait til next year.

Only five and a half months to go...