I dunno, Lar.  I happen to have Bill James’ NHBA in my office right now, and I opened it up to the 70s.  His list of good nicknames from that decade is as follows:

Sugar Bear (Larvelle Blanks)
Downtown Ollie Brown
Pudge (Fisk)
Dirty Al (Gallagher)
Rojo (Doug Rader)
The Rooster (Burleson)
Chicken (Fred Stanley)
The Bird (Fidrych)
Bigfoot (Bob Stanley)

From this list only Pudge’s and to some extent Fidrych’s remain in popular consciousness. Add in Charlie Hustle and the other, more well-known ones of that era.  My guess is that at any given time before then there were tons of nicknames floating around, not all good of course, but they were there.  As I sit here now I can’t even think of nine players from the past ten years with nicknames like that (meaning: unqiue as opposed to diminuitives or plays on names; not saying they have to be good).  Let’s see:

Pronk
Big Unit
King Felix
Big Hurt
Mad Dog
Mexicutioner
Big Papi

I’m sure I’m missing some, but I wonder if we get too far beyond 10, and they’ll all be stars or near stars. Why don’t the workaday players get them anymore?

That’s fair, Craig. Obviously there were more than we remember today. Maybe I’m wrong.

I just did a super-quick, super-simple query of the lahman database. The lahman db, like Baseball Reference itself, includes player nicknames. So, for Albert Pujols, you might find “The Machine”, “Prince Albert”, “Phat Albert”, or “El Hombre” while for Ivan Rodriguez you might see “Pudge” or “I-Rod”. I can’t vouch for all the nicknames (is Jim Miller really known as “Rabbit”? Who’s Jim Miller?), but someone must think that they’re well known enough to be included.

Anyhow, I did a super-quick query and looked for any nicknames for players who played in 2008 (so Moose and Mad Dog will be included). You can see the results here (I bolded some of the better/well-known ones… I don’t agree that they’re all good, though). There are definitely some interesting names on there(and lame ones). A few choice ones that we may be forgetting:

Big Donkey Dunn
Meat Hook Young
D-Train Willis
Little Sarge Matthews
The Gambler
Big Puma
Sandman
Doc Halladay
The Mayor

Lar—Great spreadsheet. I think I may need to cry “uncle” here.  Maybe it’s not a lack of nicknames, just the fact that we tend not to use them very often.  That’s less a baeball problem than it is a societal one in that our papers and broadcasts just don’t use the vernacular like they used to.  My heart and temerament are in the 1930s and 40s, so maybe this is just my problem.

(FYI for those who clicked on the spreadsheet earlier: I added a few more “sheets” to it to cover nicknames throughout the 20th century. See “Baseball Nicknames”)

Craig,

No need to cry “uncle”. I wasn’t trying to prove you wrong or anything. I’m right with you… I think it’d be nice to have more good nicknames and to use them more often. When I saw “Oil Can” Boyd instead of Dennis Boyd on that 1988 Topps baseball card, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Same with Rock Raines (it just occurred to me, but did he get that nickname because of his drug problems?). Nowadays, it seems that we either get really simple nicknames or we get deliberate, uninspired nicknames that no one ever really uses (maybe it’s true in St Louis, but it seems to me that Pujols doesn’t actually have 4 nicknames…).

Of course, that’s probably true of olden days too.

Craig,

Appreciate all the great posts. BUT I think your take on the Peavy trade is a bit off. I see very little value (measure in WPA vs. dollars) in it for the Chi. Sox, especially if they have to pick up his option year as a condition to the trade going through. See Fangraphs excellent post on the subject here: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/peavy-to-the-white-sox