I knew a man nicknamed Red only a few years back. He did not have red hair, and would always look embarrassed and not tell when asked where the nick came from. I wonder.
Maybe the same place as Karl “Red” Marx?
No, Punk used to joke that he felt like Higgins yelling at Magnum for everything he was doing all the time…
If old baseball nicknames were to distinguish between guys that had the same first name, how come there were so many guys named “Babe”, “Rube”, and “Whitey”?
I doubt that there were. You just tend to remember anyone who got famous with that name. Wikipedia has a player nickname page. The most common nickname, by far, is Heinie (for German), with 22. Ford is the lone Whitey. Compare that to how many hundreds of Joes or Johns have been in the majors over the century.
But it’s also true that any individual team at any individual time could have a Babe, a Rube, or a Whitey. They’d just be 1/25 of the team and distinctive even if there were one on each of the 16 teams.
Okay, but there really were a lot of players with the nickname “Rube” in the early 20th century. Also, there were a lot of guys called “Moose”, and for a while, it seemed like everybody with the last name Rhoades was nicknamed “Dusty”'. There were also a fair number of “Deacons”.
And whatever happened to the nickname “Dusty” for someone with the last name Miller or Rhodes?
EDIT: Wow, great minds think alike.
Strangely enough, you don’t meet a lot of people with the nickname “Tex” around here.
I haven’t heard “Three-finger” since aught-six, dagnabbit.
Joe
I think he picked up that nickname while he was playing for the Rangers, though … So there was sort of a geographical tie-in.
In addition to Whitey Ford there was Whitey Herzog. Whitey Herzog - Wikipedia . Though more famous for his subsequent career as a manager he did play in MLB from 1956-62.
Overall though, I certainly agree with your point. Nicknames were not unique, but were plenty unique enough to differentiate players. Or co-workers in most other venues.
In the USAF & USN, it is (or was in the 80s when I was in) pretty common for pilots to get nicknames or “callsigns”. In USN it seems/seemed universal, whereas in USAF it’s more like 50/50 who has one and who doesn’t.
Despite “Top Gun”, callsigns arene’t used on the radio, but are used on the ground & in the bar.
In most cases the callsign is assigned by one’s squadron mates and is a play on the persons’ name or somehow commemorates some particularly stupid or inept move. Classic example: A friend of mine (no, really) was named “Truck.” He was a pretty big guy as pilots go, but he got the name by falling out of the pickup truck which carried us from the squadron building out to where the jets were parked. We were only going 5-10 mph and nothing was wounded but his pride. But the name was instantly applied & stuck.
Ummm…the nickname Red hasn’t totally gone away. 
I also work with a guy called Tex. He’s not from Texas, but from Jamaica. He got the nick when he first started with us by coming in one day wearing cowboy boots. One of the other guys hollered “Where’d you park your horse, Tex?” and it stuck.
People keep trying to call my red-headed son Red, but his red-headed grandmother hates it, so I won’t let them. He has plenty of other nicknames to go by.
There was a new freshman who went to a party in Isla Vista, the student ghetto beside UCSB. Being new there, he wasn’t up on all the local oddities, and he leaned back while sitting on the deck, and promptly fell off the deck and down the cliff. He was fine, but had a new nickname: Cliff.
The first thing you should note is that nicknames were very frequently insulting. Some attribute of the person or something they did would be turned into a nickname. The idea was to continually remind the person of what he was or what he once did. The people who gave the nicknames would claim that they were just kidding, but the effect was to show the person that they would never forget that he was a little different.
A nickname like “Fats” would be for someone was heavier than average. A nickname like “Babe” would be for someone with a heavy-looking face (i.e., a baby face). A nickname like “Red” would be for someone with red hair, which was not the average hair color. The nicknames based on things they did were even more clearly insulting (and often based on a single incident). missred talks about someone nicknamed “Tex” because they once wore cowboy boots and lukeinva talks about calling someone “Tex” because they weren’t a good shot in golf.
We are actually less mean-spirited today than we used to be. This sort of constantly harping on someone’s characteristics (which were nontypical or assumed to be bad) was more common back then. It was always explained away as being a joke, but the fact is that humor is one kind of way of controlling people. And this accounts for much of the reason that nicknames are less common.
No, he was called that when he played for Georgia Tech, if not even before.
Baseball culture, internally, is pretty devoted to nicknames. In many organizations, virtually everybody gets a nickname, even if it’s just a pointless and stupid-sounding diminution of their surname. “Tex” for Teixeira was pretty much inevitable. The main difference is that this is a good nickname and is thus known and used outside the dugout.
He probably writes bloody awful poetry.
Research reveals that the nickname RED went out of favor when it was discovered that those with RED hair and freckles suffer from the disease GINGERVITIS. They have no soul. SOUTH PARK did an insightful and thorough expose on this disease a couple years ago, revealing the soul-less nature of gingers (those infected) and of those who suffer from a lesser form of the disease who are known as DAY-WALKERS. Reddish hair and no freckles.
Once they were outed by SOUTH PARK, Gingers and Day-walkers have avoided the all revealing nick-name of RED.
Tex’s demise may have something to do with either a pair of presidents, Waco, or the number of Ex’s living in Texas.
Steve
I just watched The Pacific about Marines in WWII. Practically every guy gets a nickname as part of the unofficial hazing/bonding process.
So here’s my WAG: nickname tagging was a habit carried into the general culture by guys returning from the military (like short haircuts). During WWI and WWII a large percentage of men served, so there were a lot of those guys around. They gave nicknames to their kids; the kids gave them to their friends. After the 50s when not so many fathers were military men, the practice started to peter out.
If there’s anything to this, you should see a similar drop in nickname use between the Civil War and WWI.
I can’t cite a study but my experience in reading history, along with lists like the baseball nickname page I cited earlier, doesn’t give any evidence for either part of this. No drops between wars, no spikes after wars.
Most wartime nicknaming that took place was probably local and didn’t last outside that group.