MLB history was made Wednesday night in Atlanta, where Braves call-up Jarrod Saltalamacchia made his big league debut, an event of keen interest to the many (OK, several) onomastically inclined fans who've been obsessively tracking his progress through the Braves' farm system in recent years. That's because Saltalamacchia's 14-letter surname is the lengthiest in MLB history. His appearance broke a longstanding logjam atop baseball's longest-name leader board, where the record had previously been shared by such 13-letter wonders as Kirk Dressendorfer, William VanLandingham, Steve Wojciechowski, Todd Hollandsworth and the immortal Tim Spooneybarger.
Saltalamacchia's glory comes at the expense of baseball's other 14-letter prospect, Springfield Cardinals pitcher Cory Rauschenberger, who's now just a footnote (and who, like Saltalamacchia, is no picnic for whoever has to stitch the names on the jerseys). But don't count Rauschenberger out just yet: According to this page, he changed his surname from Meacham last winter. Now that the 14-letter MLB record has already been set, look for Rauschenberger to take an even longer name -- Ciemnoczolowski, say -- in the near future.
While Saltalamacchia and Rauschenberger may vie for the MLB record, they're not even close to having the longest surname in all of sports, a mark apparently held by Dutch soccer player Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink (yes, that's really his name, and it's really on his jersey), whose moniker clocks in at a whopping 20 letters, plus two spaces. But with more and more married couples choosing to retain both partners' surnames in a hyphenated format, it's only a matter of time before we see something even longer. Imagine the possibilities, for example, if one of these guys married the other guy's sister. The mind fairly boggles.
-- Paul Lukas