MLB Draft 2015: Best Names

What's in a name?

Quite a lot actually, maybe anyway. I have a theory that a player with a boring name sometimes gets lost in the shuffle compared to a player of equal skill with a more standout name. I ran this idea by a couple of baseball friends a few years ago. One of them, a former scout still active in the game, felt that there was probably something to the theory. Another one, a front office person, felt it was a silly idea.

Silly or not, you have to admit that a player with a cool name is simply fun to follow. And every year come draft time there are lots of cool names. Here are some examples from 2015 and were the names would properly belong if they weren't attached to baseball players.

Luken Baker: sounds like main character from a 1970s cop-on-the-edge film played by Joe Don Baker.
Francis Christy: sounds like a character from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story.
Seamus Curran: sounds like a character from a James Joyce novel.
Chandler Day: co-star of an overly cheery sitcom from the late 1990s.
Icezack Flemming: Rapper, carries on rivalry with J.D. Hammer.
Mitch Ghelfli: Irish/Italian mob character from The Sopranos.
J.D. Hammer: Rapper, carries on a rivalry with Icezack Flemming.
C.J. Hinojosa: Secondary character in a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Dustin Hurlbutt: name invented by Bart Simpson or Beavis for prank telephone calls.
Drasen Johnson: starship captain
Ryan Mountcastle: Soap opera star.
Cole Peragine: sounds like a character from a JK Rowling novel.
Rock Rucker: If there was no such thing as baseball, he'd invent it.
Blaise Salter: Serial killer from Criminal Minds.
Ethan Skender: Skeptical FBI agent assigned to follow Mulder by the Cigarette-Smoking Man.
Owen Spiwak: Pitched for the Angels in The Naked Gun.
Dansby Swanson: Town lawyer in an unpublished Harper Lee story.
Max Schrock: Batman villain.
Christian Turnipseed: from a Mark Twain story, friend of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.