The springtimes of boyhood were framed around baseball for me, from playing every day to rooting passionately every day for the hometown Baltimore Orioles.
Photo Above: Eppa Rixey’s 1933 baseball card.
But there was another compelling aspect that drew me: names. Magical names like Virgil Trucks and Granny Hamner, Coot Veal and Oil Can Boyd, Dizzy Dean and Minnie Minoso (whose real first name was the equally magical Orestes).
Not necessarily the best players of their day, but you wanted to say their names out loud, and to read the backs of their baseball cards to find out more about what part of the land that name came from.
In more recent years, in play of a lifetime habit, I’ve become enamored with a baseball name from our region—one from before I was around to pay attention to the game and its players.
Eppa Rixey.
How do you get to have a name like that?
And at the same time get to stand 6’5” at a tidy 210 pounds. And throw left-handed to the degree that, at his retirement from Major League Baseball in 1933 at age 42, hold the record for most wins by a left-handed pitcher.
Going beyond the backs of baseball cards, you learn that Eppa Rixey was born in Culpeper, Virginia, to an aristocratic family, was a star pitcher while he attended the University of Virginia and went from there directly to the big leagues, having never pitched in the minors. He was an intellectual kind of person who wrote poetry (how could he not, given the name) and who taught high-school Latin in the off-season.
But wait, there’s even more to the marvelous moniker: His nickname, which he apparently adapted as his heretofore non-existent middle name, was Jephtha, a variation on a biblical name.
Rixey was said to like it because of its resonance when conjoined with Eppa. He also enjoyed that it “sounds like a cross between a Greek-letter fraternity and a college yell.”
There are some great big-league baseball names to listen out for this spring—Mookie Betts and Lars Nootbar to name just two—but for my baseball-card money, the best ever is Eppa Jephtha Rixey.
The story above first appeared in our March / April 2024 issue.
