Category: Nonsense

There have been many embarrassing and unfortunate baseball monikers over the years. Wagon Tongue Keister, Half Pint Rye, Goober Zuber, Creepy Crespi, Putsy Caballero and Cuckoo Christensen¹ come to mind. The championship, however, is uncontested, because those other guys had silly names given to them, while Ugly Dickshot would have had a hilarious name even without a sobriquet. The fact that he also had a great nickname was just icing on the cake. The only way he could have lost is if Russell Kuntz had been nicknamed “Slippery” instead of “Rusty.”

Ugly wasn’t really all that ugly, but he owned that nickname (“I’m the ugliest man in baseball”), and was a pretty fair ballplayer. A star in the high minors, he had seasons like .359 with 117 RBI one year in Buffalo, .356 for Jersey City, and .352 with 200+ hits and 99 RBI for Hollywood. In each of those three seasons, he finished in the top three in his league in batting average, winning outright in his year with Jersey City. Unfortunately for Ugly, Buffalo ain’t the Big Apple. He kicked around the bigs for four years as a spare outfielder and pinch hitter in the 1930s, headed back to the minors, then re-emerged in the big show many years later, when baseball was desperate for warm bodies in the late war years. To his credit, he batted .303 and stole 18 bases during the one year when he got to play full-time. Because of the depleted wartime rosters, he finished third in the league in batting average (missing the title by only seven points), fifth in stolen bases, and fourth in triples. Unfortunately for him, that year was 1945 and he was 35 years old, so it was back to the minors for ol’ Ug when the younger, better players returned from the war in 1946.

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Footnote #1: I love to write about Cuckoo Christensen. Maybe Ugly Dickshot wasn’t that ugly, and Creepy Crespi wasn’t that creepy, but Cuckoo Christensen was plenty cuckoo.

Walter Christensen was a Cincinnati outfielder who was essentially a one-year wonder. He never hit a major league homer, but even without any power, his having batted .350 in that one year, while leading the league in on-base percentage, still represented an impressive level of achievement for a rookie. He is the only rookie in baseball history to lead either league in OBP (unless you count the very first year of MLB, when everyone was a rookie, and somebody had to win). Because Cuckoo batted so well that season and so infrequently after it, his lifetime major league batting average never dropped below an impressive .315, with a lifetime .392 OBP! That wasn’t as much of a fluke as you might think. His lifetime average was .310 in the minors over the course of 15 years.

He got his nickname … well, to be blunt, because he deserved it. 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 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.”

Cuckoo also tried that stunt in the majors, and lost at least one game in the process, which may go a long way toward explaining the brevity of his MLB career. In “Nuggets on the Diamond”, Dick Dobbins wrote:

“With the 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.”

Nutty or not, the man led his league in on-base percentage when he was a rookie, something nobody else has ever done! How many of us would-be jocks would give up a limb to have that record?

There is a caveat to be stated. Cuckoo was basically a half-time player. He met the minimum playing-time requirements of that day for leading in percentage stats, but would not meet the modern requirements. Imposing the modern eligibility requirement for percentage-based categories to all seasons across-the-board would depose Cuckoo Christensen as the 1926 OBP leader, replaced by Hall of Famer Paul Waner, so the recalculated championship would make much more sense to modern eyes.

… but would be so much more boring than letting Cuckoo Christensen keep his crown.