I looked up every Big Leauger’s nickname on baseball reference. This may sound fun to you. Hell, the only reason I started this project was because it sounded fun to me. Believe me, it wasn’t fun. If baseball players were more funny maybe this would’ve been more fun. But in the words of Sam Miller, “baseball players aren’t funny.” As a result we are left with oodles of crappy, unoriginal nicknames. Sure, there are plenty of good ones too, and we will get to all the good and bad and weird throughout this project. Part 1 consists of breaking down the various genres of nicknames. Parts 2 and 3 will spotlight the best and worst nicknames(many of which won't be in Part 1 at all) and of course, I will rank them.

As for the nuts and bolts of this project, I didn’t do anything fancy. I simply used an excel sheet and typed up every player that was on a roster on RosterResource.com(I did this during the offseason so the database isn’t 100% accurate for opening day rosters, but I did add a bunch more players by hand). Then I searched for each player on BaseballReference.com to find their nickname.

All of this typing, and searching and typing and searching gave me a list of 934 players and their nickname, if they even have one. As a matter of fact, 61% of players in my list have a nickname. 11% have more than one nickname. More specifically, 77 players have two nicknames, 20 players have three nicknames. This continues all the way up to six nicknames! That's right, Craig Stammen has six nicknames listed on Baseball Reference: Craigaroo, Stam, Trigger, Craiger, Stammer and Trig. Quantity over quality, if I've ever seen it.

With all that preamble out of the way, it's time to get to the good stuff. We'll start with the most populated genre of nicknames.