Best names of the 2020 amateur draft

I think we can all agree that Spencer Torkelson is a great baseball name.

It’s not Brock Deatherage level good, but it’s solid, and it was just the first among many tremendous names that came out of the 2020 amateur draft. This year, the draft was reduced to only five rounds over two days, giving us far fewer names to parse through, but we still found some real gems in the mix.

A lot of trends were common this year, so we’re going to break the list into four parts: Awesome Alliteratives, Sounds Like a Baseball Player, Cool Names, and How do You Spell That?

But first, let’s look at some common trends from this year:

• 3 Austins
• 3 Jareds
• 4 Tylers
• 5 Zac/Zachs
• 7 Nicks

There were two Coles and two Garretts, but no Gerrit Cole.

We may be a long way from baseball, but we can at least enjoy thinking of these names on future jerseys.

Awesome Alliteratives

Perhaps it’s the 80s baby in me, but alliterative names used to be all the rage when I was younger. So it was delightful to see so many matching initials in this years draft class, among them such dulcet-sounding monikers as:

• Max Meyer
• Cade Cavalli
• Dillon Dingler (picked up by the Tigers!)
• Jared Jones
• Hudson Haskin
• Bryce Bonnin
• Christian Chamberlain
• Luke Little
• Spencer Strider (this is such a great name)

Sounds Like a Baseball Player

• Emerson Hancock
• Zac Veen
• Reid Detmers
• Carson Tucker
• Bobby Miller (has a name ever screamed “high school athlete” quite this much?)
• Drew Romo (actually let’s be real, this sounds like a quarterback’s name)
• Tanner Burns
• Burl Carraway (this is an old-timey movie star name)
• Landon Knack
• Blaze Jordan (this is just a great, great baseball name)
• Petey Halpin
• Colt Keith

Cool Names

• Asa Lacey
• Jarvis Bryce
• Tyler Soderstrom
• Slade Cecconi
• Alika Williams
• Daxton Fulton
• J.T. Ginn (the “gin and...” jokes are going to write themselves here)
• Alerick Soularie (he sounds like a Cajun vampire hunter)
• Tink Hence (this is easily my favorite name of the draft)
• Coby Mayo
• Beck Way
• Jagger Haynes
• Baron Radcliff (sounds like the hero in a Bronte sisters novel)

How do You Spell That?

• Carmen Mlodzinski
• Masyn Winn (this one is a winner, but the unusual first name spelling will trip people up)
• Adisyn Coffey (dytto)
• Tekoah Roby (this one will mess with some announcers for sure)
• Brady Lindsly (bets are Brady will be called “Brady Lindsey” a fair bit)
• Brandon Pfaadt
• Kala’i Rosario (hopefully an apostrophe is easier for folks than accents are)

And last but not least in the unfortunate category of “shares a name with an already famous player” category:

• Zach Britton (though to be fair the more famous one spells it “Zack”)