Ugly Dickshot
Just after his high school days, when young John Dikšas, aka Johnny Dickshot, was the athletic superstar of the Lithuanian-American community in Waukegan, his baseball coach in the local industrial league called him “Baby Dick.”
So not only was “Ugly” one of the most unflattering nicknames in baseball history, it may actually have been an upgrade.
Johnny didn’t care. He had fun playing the game, and had even more fun embellishing his legend for sportswriters. He embraced his name, referring to himself as “the ugliest man in baseball.” As he told the story, a fan once approached him and asked to stand at his side, because “I want my wife to see you, so she’ll appreciate me.”
Although he was a multi-sport star in Waukegan, and his best sport seems to have been basketball, he claimed to have chosen baseball because of the steel plate in his head. A hammer once dropped on his head and he felt nothing through the steel plate. If a hammer couldn’t bother him, he reasoned, neither could a beanball or a hard line drive.
The irony of his self-deprecating humor is that the man really could hit. He played parts of six major league seasons, and once finished third in the AL in batting average. In 1939, Casey Stengel watched Dickshot hit in spring training and declared that the big galoot had the inside track on the centerfield spot for the Boston Bees. Then he watched Johnny field, and traded him to the Giants, who soon shipped him back to the minors. They didn’t call Johnny “Rubber Gloves” for nothing.
It was in the minors that Ugly played himself handsome. He was the toast of the town in Buffalo, Jersey City and Hollywood, having batted higher than .350 in all three cities. Those clubs were at the level just below the majors, so Johnny was so close to big league stardom that he could nearly grasp it. If Buffalo had been the Big Apple, Johnny would have been Broadway John.
But Buffalo is Buffalo, and Johnny was Ugly Dickshot. He made the best of it, which is all life can expect from any of us.
Further reading: Blogger David White gathered some of the best Dickshot yarns and spun them together with a nice bio on this page.
Cuckoo Christy
Cuckoo Christy was a Cincinnati outfielder who led the NL in on-base percentage and finished second in batting average in his rookie year. That was not as impressive as it sounds. That era had different requirements for the league lead in percentage-based stats. The top four qualifiers for the batting average championship were part-time players by today’s standards! Cuckoo himself had only 329 at-bats.
But the man could hit. Cuckoo never hit a major league homer, but even without any power, a .350 batting average and the league lead in on-base percentage represented an impressive level of achievement for a rookie. Yet Cuckoo was essentially a one-year wonder. He was back in Columbus by the end of the following season. Because he batted so well in 1926 and so infrequently after it, Cuckoo’s lifetime major league batting average was an impressive .315! That was no fluke. His career in the minors spanned 15 seasons, mostly at high levels, and his lifetime average was .310.
So why didn’t he get a longer look in the big show? Well, they didn’t call him Cuckoo because he collected novelty clocks. He deserved his nickname and embraced it.
A local paper once described him out on the town in “a brown ensemble splashed with cuckoos.”
He once held out and announced that the fans could decide what he was worth.
During batting practice, he chased down fly balls from the sidecar of a motorcycle.
During real games, he did somersaults in the outfield. The history of the minor league St. Paul Saints recounts, “One of the Saints’ impressive youngsters was 22-year-old, 5’6 ½” center fielder and leadoff batter Walter (Seacap) Christensen. Christensen also was known as ‘Cuckoo Christy,’ an extrovert whose antics pleased the fans, but sometimes drove managers up the wall. He enjoyed doing somersaults in the outfield, usually when the ball was not in play. Sometimes, however, he would somersault while waiting for a lazy fly ball to come down.” Unfortunately he lost at least one game with his shenanigans. In “Nuggets on the Diamond,” Dick Dobbins wrote, “With the (Mission) Reds leading by one run in the bottom of the ninth and runners on base, Christensen went after a fly ball, did a somersault, then dropped the ball. The Reds lost the game, and an angry (manager Red) Killefer chased Christensen all the way into the centerfield clubhouse.”
The fact that Cuckoo could let his shenanigans bleed into the box score may go a long way toward explaining why a .315 hitter had such a brief NL career.
Tony Suck
Yes, that was really his name.
And not by an accident of birth. He chose to be Tony Suck. He was born Charles A. Zuck in Chicago on November 11, 1858. Somewhere along the way, for reasons unrecorded and shrouded in mystery, Charles Zuck decided that what his baseball career really needed was a new identity: Tony Suck.
According to the OED, the term “to suck” did not acquire its modern meaning until 1971, so poor Tony Suck could not have known how we would view his name. But suck he did. Sure, there have been other major league hitters who truly sucked. Bill Bergen, Casey Wise and Ray Oyler, all of whom had lifetime batting averages in the .170s, come immediately to mind. But none of them sucked like Tony Suck. His major-league batting average of .151, with an OPS+ of 24, was only the tip of his sucking iceberg, because he achieved even that minimal level of success in the Union Association, a marginal major league at best. His batting average in a brief NL stint was a perfect .000. He couldn’t even hit in the minors. After a year out of pro baseball, he attempted an 1886 comeback in the Southern Association, which at that time was a Class B league, and hit a sparkling .091 (8 for 88) for the Augusta Browns.
Could Tony have stayed in the game for his glove skills, à la Bill Bergen and Ray Oyler? I doubt it. He played 32 major league games at catcher and made 32 errors. He played 15 games at shortstop and made 16 errors. He also subbed in the outfield, where his fielding percentage was .783. While fielding stats from the 1880s are misleading when viewed out of context because the game was very different, it does not seem that Tony had enough other skills to offset his weak bat.
He just plain sucked.
There are those who say that our names play a part in determining our fates, and therefore that a guy named Duke Pfister is more likely to become a successful boxer than a guy named Murray Finkelstein. There is undoubtedly at least a grain of truth in this axiom, thus explaining why a young man named Randall Poffo thought his wrestling career might go better as Randy Savage. I wonder if things would have worked out better for a youthful Charles Zuck if he had changed his name to Charlie Starr.
Pebbly Jack Glasscock
I would love to tell you some colorful stories about Pebbly Jack Glasscock. From his name, I imagined that he had to turn to baseball after a failed career as the world’s worst pirate. If only he were simply John Anderson, nicknamed Glasscock for his ineptitude in the bedroom, and then Pebbly Jack because he constantly ran his ship aground. After years cluelessly adrift on the high seas or haplessly beached on the shore, he finally shivered his last timber, buckled his last swash, and turned in his cutlass for a bat.
None of that is true.
He does have one colorful element in his bio. An 1886 newspaper claimed that Pebbly Jack originated the term “charley horse,” supposedly because limping ballplayers reminded him of his old horse named Charley.
Other than that dubious bit of etymology, he was achromatic. He was a family man whose only permanent address in 89 years of life was the West Virginia house where he was born. And he was all business at shortstop. Glasscock was his real name, and he was nicknamed Pebbly Jack for his meticulous groundskeeping around his portion of the infield. He removed all the pebbles to assure a true bounce, an obsession that would have made Freddie Lindstrom‘s life considerably happier forty years later. This attention to detail, as well as his brilliant fielding, led sportswriters to dub him, “The King of the Shortstops.” He played the position barehanded, and led NL shortstops in fielding percentage seven times. He could hit as well. He led the National League twice in hits, twice in WAR, and once in batting average. When his major league career was over, he played until age 43 in the minors. There are advocates for his Hall of Fame induction, and his 62 WAR justifies their advocacy. That tops the career WAR of eight shortstops currently in the Hall. One credible sabermetrician considers Pebbly Jack to have been the best shortstop of the 19th century, and he was certainly the best of the 1880s.
Silly name; serious ballplayer.
There have been so many colorful nicknames that I could have chosen a completely different roster.
Well, except for Ugly Dickshot. He’s the top name on any list. He’s the Babe Ruth of this category.
For reference, here is what the boys really looked like.
From the left: Cuckoo, Pebbly Jack, Ugly, The Suckmeister.
Interestingly, three of those guys were really good at baseball. The other was Tony Suck. He really sucked.
