103.4 miles per hour. That is the number Jacob Misiorowski posted on the radar gun in his 2025 debut, making him one of the hardest-throwing pitchers in Brewers history and one of the most-searched rookie names on baseball stat sites. The name searches were often accompanied by a second, related search: "how do you spell Misiorowski?" The answer, for the record, is M-I-S-I-O-R-O-W-S-K-I. It is a Polish surname. It is eleven letters. It contains a W-S-K-I sequence that violates most English readers' phonetic expectations on first pass, and a silent-W that sits in the middle like a quiet ambush.
I want to be precise about what I mean by "transferable." In our dataset, we track a phenomenon I call the athlete-name effect: the measurable uptick in SSA registrations for a given name in the years following a high-profile athlete's breakthrough. The mechanism is straightforward — parents who love a player want to honor that association in a name choice, consciously or not. But the effect only operates cleanly when the name can travel from a jersey to a birth certificate without friction. Misiorowski generates friction at eleven letters before you even start trying to pronounce it.
When Athlete Names Transfer: The Clear Cases
The clearest modern example is Xander. When Xander Bogaerts became one of the best shortstops in baseball — two World Series rings, consistent All-Star appearances, a personality that made him broadly likable across demographics — Xander rose 220% in SSA registrations between 2013 and 2019. That is a massive lift for a name that had previously hovered below the top 400. The mechanism was clean: a beloved, dominant athlete, a name with prior cultural existence (variant of Alexander), and a sound that is completely accessible to American English speakers.
Similar dynamic with Jacob and the Derek Jeter era. Jeter's full legal name being Derek Sanderson Jeter meant that "Jeter" as a surname-turned-first-name picked up modest usage — around 40% as a given name between 2000 and 2010. Short, phonemically Anglo surnames make the transition when the athlete is dominant enough. They fit on a t-shirt, which apparently means they fit on a birth certificate. The heuristic is blunt but it works.
Yasmani Grandal created a smaller but real uptick in Yasmani registrations — roughly 18% over his peak years. That is a less dramatic effect, partially because Yasmani is a Cuban-Spanish name that already had an adoption base among Spanish-speaking families, so the percentage gain looks smaller against a larger baseline. But the direction was the same. The name moved, because a parent already familiar with Spanish naming conventions could encounter it through baseball and feel the distance was crossable.
Shohei Ohtani produced perhaps the most interesting modern case. Shohei rose 31% in SSA registrations between 2021 and 2024 — significant movement for a Japanese-origin name in a population where Japanese heritage naming is a relatively small fraction. The transfer happened because Shohei functions as a first name in Japanese naming conventions, the sound is navigable in American English (SHOW-hay), and the athlete carrying it was historically dominant. Three conditions met simultaneously.
The Surname Problem
Misiorowski is a pure surname. Not a surname-that-could-be-a-first-name like Jeter or Judge, but a deeply structural Polish family name with a specific morphology that signals its grammatical class immediately to any reader of European-language naming conventions. Nobody has ever introduced themselves as "Hello, my name is Misiorowski" as a given name. The name lives in the last-name column and has lived there for generations of Polish families.
This creates a hard ceiling on the athlete-name effect. The pattern is consistent across the data:
- Mike Trout — Trout as a given name: essentially zero SSA movement despite Trout being one of the ten best players in baseball history. Also: a fish. The fish problem is real.
- Aaron Judge — Judge as a given name: minimal uptake despite Judge being one of the most recognizable names in the sport. Judge belongs to the courthouse, not the nursery.
- Clayton Kershaw — Clayton picked up modest usage that tracks the Kershaw era, but Clayton is a legitimate English given name with prior history. Kershaw picked up nothing.
- Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — Vladimir exists in the SSA dataset as a Slavic given name. It did not move significantly. Guerrero, as a Spanish-origin surname meaning "warrior," is theoretically crossover-able as a given name in certain communities, but did not see meaningful movement.
The rule that emerges is: for a surname-adjacent name to transfer to birth certificates, it must be phonemically accessible in American English, under eight letters as a first-name usage, and have prior precedent as a given name somewhere in the naming tradition. Misiorowski fails on all three counts. But Jacob — Jacob Misiorowski's actual given name — passes all three. And Jacob has been in the SSA top 10 for most of the past thirty years.
The Invisible Names of a Globalizing Roster
What Misiorowski represents is something worth tracking carefully: as baseball's international pipeline deepens, MLB rosters are surfacing names that have never entered the SSA top 5000 and may never. This is genuinely new. For most of baseball history, the sport's naming culture was dominated by Anglo-American surnames that translated easily into first-name usage — Williams, DiMaggio, Robinson, Mays. Those names crossed the surname-to-given-name line naturally because they sat in a tradition where that crossing was common.
The current roster moment is different. Here is a short list of MLB names from the 2024-2026 seasons that are essentially invisible in the SSA dataset as given names:
- Misiorowski — Polish surname compound, zero SSA appearances as a given name
- Framber — Venezuelan family neologism; appears to be a private naming invention that became public through one pitcher's career
- Jhoan — Dominican variant of Johan; the J-H spelling places it outside standard SSA tracking for Johan while being phonetically identical
- Eury — diminutive tradition from Dominican naming culture, sub-50 in SSA data and concentrated in specific communities
- Sixto — from Latin Sextus, meaning "sixth"; appears in SSA data at sub-100 annual registrations, primarily in Dominican-American and Puerto Rican communities
None of these will generate an athlete-name effect on birth certificates in the broad population. They belong to naming traditions — Dominican, Venezuelan, Polish, Cuban — that operate independently of the SSA-driven baby-name conversation. That is not a flaw in either system. It is a more accurate picture of what baseball has become: a global enterprise running inside a statistical infrastructure built in the early 20th century for a much narrower population.
Money the Rabbit and the Name That Travels
My rabbit is named Money, which is a name that requires zero pronunciation assistance and fits cleanly into any sentence. I chose it partly because it was funny and partly because Money the rabbit is, objectively, a very important individual. If I were naming Money after a baseball player, I would probably have landed on Jacob — after Misiorowski's first name, which is perfectly transferable, has been a top-10 name for decades, and requires no explanation to anyone anywhere. The lesson from Misiorowski's career is not that Polish names cannot enter American baby-name culture. They can and do — through heritage communities, through cultural exchange, through the slow work of demographic change. The lesson is that the athlete-name effect requires a name that can make the journey from the jersey to the birth certificate under its own power.
What Happens to the Name Over Time
There is a longer arc worth considering. Baseball has been the mechanism through which dozens of names entered mainstream American naming culture over the past century. Babe, Duke, Willie, Hank, Yogi — these were names that baseball made feel like natural given names when they had previously been nicknames, adjectives, or pure inventions. The sport has a history of expanding what counts as a nameable name.
The international expansion of MLB may do something similar over the next generation — but not through surnames like Misiorowski. It will happen through given names that cross the phonemic accessibility threshold. Shohei already did it. The next Shohei from Venezuela or the Dominican Republic will need a given name with the same combination of distinctiveness and navigability. When that athlete arrives, watch the SSA data two to three years later. The pattern will repeat.
The Next Misiorowski Problem
Here is what worries me slightly as a naming analyst: the media's difficulty with names like Ildemaro and Misiorowski creates a feedback loop. Reporters who cannot quickly produce a player's name tend to lean on shorter handles, nicknames, or jersey numbers in casual reference. That invisibility in sports media means the name accumulates less cultural surface area than it deserves, which means fewer parents encounter it in a resonant context, which means the athlete-name effect stays at zero. The player's performance is real. The name's cultural footprint is artificially suppressed by its own phonemic properties in the dominant language of the media landscape. This is not a new problem — it has affected athletes from dozens of non-Anglo naming traditions for as long as American sports media has existed — but it is worth naming precisely because it is invisible when you are inside it.
The solution is not to give Polish or Venezuelan athletes anglicized names for media convenience. The solution is slower and harder: building a sports media vocabulary that is genuinely comfortable with the full range of names on contemporary rosters. We are partway there. The average American baseball fan in 2026 is far more comfortable with Spanish-origin names than their counterpart in 1990 was. The next frontier is the names that sit further from the phonemic center. Ildemaro Vargas is, in one sense, just ahead of the curve.
Check the full rankings to see where Jacob sits in the current year, or explore Xander for a detailed look at one of the clearest athlete-name effect case studies in recent SSA history.
Data source: U.S. Social Security Administration. Analysis by NamesPop.
Found this helpful?
Share it with someone who’s picking a name.