“Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.”
- Leo Durocher
I love this time of year. It offers so many new beginnings…I guess that's the only kind there are. The stone rolls away at Easter, green bursts forth in spring, and Major League Baseball opens its season with every team in first place, at least for one day. Chances are, though, no matter where any of those 30 teams end up in the standings at season's end, nobody named Bob will have been involved.
It was noted last year, when the Tampa Bay Rays called up a guy named Bob Seymour, that there hadn't been a Bob in the majors since 2010. That's some dearth of Bobs.
At one time there was an abundance of Bobs in the game. The 1971 the World Series champion Pittsburg Pirates had five Bobs on their roster. For much of baseball's history there were Bobs everywhere: Gibson, Feller, Lemon, Uecker, Horner, Boone, Brenley, Tewksberry, Miller, Oliver, Welch, Friend, Robertson and Watson. Bobs aplenty.
What happened? Well, names come and go. Some come back and some go away and stay gone forever. In the 1920s and 30s, Robert was the most popular name for a boy in America. In 2025 it was ninetieth. Currently, the most popular boy names are Liam, Noah and Oliver.
The name Robert can have many derivatives and I've been about all of them. Robbie, Bobby, Bob, Little Bobby, Big Bob, Uncle Bobby, Robbie Charles and Roberto. I answer to any and all of them. As they say, “Call me anything you like, just call me.”
PLAY BALL!