Sports Reference Blog

In April of 2021, we announced a series of changes to player name presentations on Baseball Reference and Pro Football Reference in which we changed the main name presentation for many historical players who had been tagged with offensive nicknames decades ago. When we completed that task, we hinted that we'd perform similar work with less offensive nicknames, as well.

Last summer Eli Gnesin, one of our data interns, reviewed hundreds of names in our database to ascertain if nicknames popularized by the 1969 MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia (and in some cases afterwards) were accurate representations of what players were known as during their playing careers. In turns out that in nearly 200 cases, the names in our database were not the names that were most commonly used during playing careers. Thanks to online newspaper databases with thousands of references to these players, it is possible to determine with confidence what a player was primarily known as during their playing career, so we have made some amendments where it felt warranted. Some of them were closer calls than others, none moreso than the relatively recent Karl/Tuffy Rhodes conundrum.

Without further ado, here is a list of the name presentations we have changed on Baseball Reference. These players will still show up in our site search function if you use their old names because they are still noted on the page. If you think any of these ought to be changed back and have sufficient evidence, please feel free to contact us:

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2022 at 11:52 am and is filed under Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.