Based on present-day rosters of the 30 Major League Baseball teams,
I'd like to know the top 5 most common last names, and the top 5 most
common first names.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 05 Jun 2004 22:32 PDT

Bit of an odd question.  Cool.  But odd.

It's actually do-able, but the only way I can figure to do it is
pretty laborious.

I did the "B's" for starters.  There are 234 major league ballplayers
whose last name begins with the letter B.  Of those:

BROWN is the most commone surname (9), followed by BELL (5).

First names are trickier due to spelling variations.

There are 8 MIKEs and 1 MICHAEL
7 BRIANs and 1 BRYAN
6 CHRIS's, 1 CHRISTIAN and 1 KRIS
7 JASONs and 1 JAYSON

'Fraid I can't do the whole alphabet for 8 bucks.  But if you want to
try this yourself (it ain't that easy -- lots of cutting and pasting
and sorting in spreadsheets and counting of names) I can post the
instructions for doing it as an answer to your question.

Let me know what you think.

Hello Mjsz

This question is crying out for a computer to do all the hard work so
I wrote a small script to count the different names of the Major
League Baseball players.  I obtained the players names from this
location:

http://bigleaguers.yahoo.com/mlbpa/players?type=lastname&query=Z

The most common surnames in Major League Baseball are:

González - 10 players
López - 8
Hernández - 7
Pérez - 7
Wilson - 7
García - 6
Miller - 6
Anderson - 5
Johnson - 5
Lee - 5
Ramirez - 5
Rodriguez - 5
Walker - 5

First names are a little more tricky to calculate as their are
shortened versions of some names, for instance Jim is short for James.

The most common first names are:

Mike or Michael - 35 players (28 + 7)
Jason - 30
Brian - 20
David or Dave - 19 (11 + 8)
Matt or Matthew - 19 (18 + 1)
José - 18
Scott - 18
John or Johnny - 16 (14 + 2)
Mark - 16
Jeff or Jeffrey - 15 (14 + 1)
Chris - 12
Eric - 12
Joe - 12
Kevin - 12
Todd - 12
Carlos - 11
Chad - 11
Tim - 11

There were also 5 Jon's and 1 Jonny.

Incidentally pafalafa-ga stated that there were 9 Browns and 5 Bells,
the data I used at the following location only contained 3 Brown's and
2 Bell's:

http://bigleaguers.yahoo.com/mlbpa/players?type=lastname&query=B

I hope this answers your question.  If you have any further questions
or queries please ask for clarification and I will do all I can to
help.

Thank you for the interest in my question and your excellent answer.

Nice work!  Wish I could program.

The data I accessed (from the MLB site) included quite a number of
players sent to the minors, so it's a different roster than the one at
Yahoo.

By the way, do you think that Mike Gonzalez (Pittsburgh) realizes the
exalted position he occupies...?

pafalafa-ga