Night Owl Cards

For most of my life, the word "Santana" has been synonymous with one of my favorite bands of all-time. Although I was still toddling around during Woodstock, Santana's music is timeless and universal and has been the soundtrack to many moments in my life. But then I came across "Santana" in the world of baseball and things were never the same. It was just one guy for a little while. But then there was another, and another, and now, in the last two years, there are a record number of Santanas playing major league baseball. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning. Because that is the way " Spawn " is played. We find the one player who started it all -- who had a name that no other player in the majors had featured before, and then find all the players who came after him, who have that same name. "Santana" was not a major league name until 1983, two years after the band Santana released the platinum-se...

Thousands of names fill the major league baseball archives. With the sheer volume of players who have competed in baseball for the last 140 or so years, there are bound to be names that repeat. Not just Smith and Jones, but less common ones like Darwin, Hampton and Moreland. Since baseball is a family game, the same names pop up all the time. Bell. Boone. Canseco. But have you noticed that every once in awhile, a couple of players show up at around the same time with the same name and they aren't related? In fact, you may have never heard the name previously, at least not in a major league setting. There are two players with the last name Cain in baseball right now -- Matt and Lorenzo (yes, I know Matt hasn't played a game this year). They've each played together in major league baseball for the last five years, after there were just three previous Cains spread out over 125 years of baseball. There are lots of other examples of this, and sometimes I wonder how it h...