Friend of the site R.J. Anderson recently made the following comment on Twitter:
Josh Hamilton/Buster Posey = Godwin's Law of @DRaysBay. If a thread goes long enough, those names will pop up.
Tired of waiting around for pitchers and catcher to report, I decided to look back and see which Rays players from the 2008-10 seasons have been the most commented on. For the sake of consistency, we will be looking solely at searches of the last name.
First, the raw top 10 most frequently commented on:
1. Scott Kazmir 28,212
2. David Price 19,021
3. BJ Upton 8,047
4. Carlos Pena 7,979
5. Matt Garza 7,082
6. Jonny Gomes 6,866
7. James Shields 6,680
8. Ben Zobrist 6,412
9. Jason Bartlett 5,495
10. Jeff Niemann 5,399
Price and Kazmir may or may not have received artificial boosts for User Names and the word "price". Seems amazing that Niemann would have drawn more comments than oh say...Crawford. It pays to have no pet names.
How about the bottom 10?
- Mike DiFelice 89
- Kurt Birkins 113
- Andy Cannizaro 121 (H/T FOTS RJ Anderson!)
- Jason Isringhausen 147
- Russ Springer 198
- Jeff Bennett 251
- Jae Kuk Ryu 267
- Scott Dohmann 304
- Chris Richard 363
- Mike Ekstrom 371
What if we were to add some context of tenure, such as comments per game played in a Rays uniform (min 20 games)?
Top 10:
- David Price 317
- Scott Kazmir 195
- Wade Davis 136
- Jeff Niemann 82
- Matt Garza 75
- Dan/Elliot Johnson 50
- Matt Joyce 46
- Jame Shields 44
- Edwin Jackson 42
- Hank Blalock 39
Bottom 10:
- MIke DiFelice .36
- Akinori Iwamura 2.23
- Rocco Baldelli 2.68
- Carl Crawford 3.56
- Dioner Navarro 6.21
- Trever Miller 6.41
- Scott Dohmann 7.07
- Russ Springer 7.62
- Randy Choate 9.74
- Evan Longoria 10.52
Finally a quick peek at nicknames with over 1000 comments. Note: Rocco, Aki, Kaz, Los and Longo were not considered due to name overlap.
- CC 7,377
- Navi 6,872
- Sonny 5,424
- Bossman 2,824
- Briggy 1,490
- Beej 1,447
- PTB 1,114
- MVB 1,021
As for Hamilton and Posey, 1,1100 and 600 comments respectively. A complete set of all 08-10 players can be found here.