When I was a kid I looked for reflections of some greater undiscovered part of myself in my baseball cards, but in the 1970s the only guy anywhere close to sharing my name and giving me hope that I might someday belong in the world I spent all my solitary hours glorifying was Von Joshua. Von Joshua wasn’t that great, and even though I wasn’t sure if the Joshua in his name was a last name or part of a single official title (like Count Dracula), I knew it didn’t really match my own. Also, my grasp on his identity was slippery: for some reason I always thought of him as the hazy fourth Alou. And then when his disappearance from baseball coincided with the appearance of Von Hayes the fog just increased, distancing any connection between my name and baseball.
As far as I knew there never had been a major league Josh and never would be. On closer inspection now I see that there were a few Joshes in baseball’s earlier eras, but none since a couple journeymen named Josh Billings in the 1920s and no one at all of note besides Josh Devore, who had a brief career as a speedy outfielder for the pennant-winning Giants of the early teens.
Now, however, baseball is lousy with Joshes. So is everything. After taking a victory lap around my apartment to celebrate Josh Beckett’s dominating game 1 shutout of the Angels (i.e., going to the kitchen to look for chocolate, finding none, and stuffing a piece of rye bread with cream cheese into my face instead) I came back to the living room and watched a couple minutes of a show my wife had just switched to, in which the parents of a young tan mousse-haired douchebag were subjecting a woman with fake breasts to a lie detector test. The mousse-haired douchebag’s name was Josh.
“I’m getting together with the rest of the Joshes and voting this douchebag out of our name!” I fumed. But there are so many Joshes now, many of them probably moussed douchebags, that if there ever was a global meeting convened the expulsion votes might end up purging any lingering unmoussed solitary oddballs left over from the earlier less-Josh-heavy days of yore, like me. Banished, I’d have to change my name to some extinct moniker such as Festus or Mortimer or Increase.
But until that day comes when I’m forced to roam the land, a name-exile, I can balance the pain of seeing more and more idiots named Josh with the singular pleasure, the boyhood dream, of watching the most important player on my favorite baseball team turn in performances like the one he had last night.
Go, Josh, go!
For me, Von Joshua will always exist as the guy who made the last outs as a pinch hitter in each of the last two games of the 1974 World Series. Those two at-bats appear in A's highlight videos all the time. In game four, he grounded into a game-ending, highlight-reel-quality 4-6-3 double play. In game five, he tapped back to Rollie Fingers, who skipped halfway to first base in joy, before remembering he had to throw the ball, and then the celebration began.
Baseball Reference shows that before the early nineties, there were 44 IP over two seasons by a guy with my name, earning himself an ERA of 4.90 and a 1.58 WHIP. There's another guy that hit .179/.246/.217 in 106 ABs. Nothing you'd attempt to associate yourself with as an eight year old.
So it was sort of cool when I was reading about the minor league prospects on my favorite team a long time ago and there was this guy that had the same first name I did. He even spelled it the same. Maybe he'd make the team for a few days and I'd be able to think sometimes about the guy with my first name played for my favorite team. A little thing to get me through the day.
He managed to do that. He also managed to inspire more irrational emotion, both positive and negative, than anyone in sports. I can tell people how to spell my name over the phone by making reference to him. It's very effective. It works just as well in NY and Boston.
"My first name is Derek, like Jeter..."
As a kid I was also a huge Stabler fan. The Snake is a legend down here in Alabama. He currently provides color commentary for the Crimson Tide radio broadcasts.
Recently, I heard him discussing how different it was to go from playing for the old-school strict disciplinarian Bear Bryant to the new-school easygoing player's coach John Madden (Madden was only 32 when he became the Raider head coach). They didn't have many rules: be on time and play hard... that was about it.
Those Raider teams were fun to watch. I have a question for you, Ken: Do you think Stabler should be in the Hall of Fame?
I'm angling for an endorsement deal. "Cream Cheese: It's not just something to steal from Isla Vista grocery stores anymore."
3 : Your namesake was himself named after a famous sports star (and author of the autobiography "I've Gotta Be Me" and assister on Bobby Orr's famously photogenic flying-through-the air Cup-winning goal) Derek Sanderson, was he not?
5 : I hope you kicked the ass of the kid in your kindergarten named Ronald after the actual elections.
2 , 6 : Big fan of "The Snake." Lord, has he aged.
The answer to inevitable question of how I became a Yankees fan when I was living in South Carolina is that my parents moved there from NY. Grandma remained in NY and took me to Yankees games when I'd visit every summer until we moved back.
Until the emergence of Derek Jeter, I was voluntarily or involuntarily affiliated by name with the following real or fictional people:
1. Derek and the Dominoes
2. Derek Rickman
3. Derek Bell (the racer, not the baseball player)
4. Bo Derek
5. Derek Smalls
2 There was a time that I called myself Kenny in an attempt to be associated with Kenny Roberts, who I thought was more important than Lincoln, Jefferson, Jesus, Mohammed, and Ghandi at the time. I still will fill out forms that I think will eventually lead to undesirable junk mail as Kenny Roberts. Probably not a cool thing to send Kenny Roberts all of my junk mail, I guess.
Number of Brents in Baseball Prospectus' Player Search: 16. The only ones of note, at least from my glance, are Brent Mayne, Brent Gates (the only players to amass more than a paltry 10 Career WARP), and Brent Lillibridge, a somewhat touted prospect.
So I wonder if it would have an impact on me to have a rooting interest in a player, or one with a baseball card, at least, who bore my name. I just had to deal with most people knowing of no one else named Brent except Brent Musburger, whom I was not overly fond of as an announcer while growing up.
JtD and Jose Lopez are not helping.
The name became mildly popular in the 1970's and since then has really taken off, hitting the top 5 among male names in the US since about the 1980's. There are so many little brats out there named Joshua or Josh these days --- I liked it better when I had a less common name.
The first draft was in 1965. In 1966 the Yankees drafted him in the 10th round (190th overall). In 1967 the Mets drafted him in the 11th round (155th overall) of the January secondary draft. In 1968 the Astros drafted him in the 2nd round (24th overall) of the January draft.
Rumor has it that he was close to actually signing with the Astros at one point, but decided to pursue football instead.
12 I have an 11 year old, so I get Drake and Josh inflicted on me on a pretty regular basis. They were both on another Nickelodeon show with Amanda Bynes a few years ago, a sketch comedy show which was actually much funnier. It's not bad, though, really-the little sister is played by Miranda Cosgrove, who was in School of Rock.
1 I love cream cheese, and have the body to prove it. I look more or less like an out of shape John Kruk. (No, that's not redundant.)
The goaltender for the star-crossed, Madison Square Garden-based New York Raiders franchise during the inaugural season of the World Hockey Association in 1972-73 was one Ian Wilkie.
Make of this what you will, Brer Wilker.
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