"Me and Bobby McGee"

Like many of you out there, I've always wondered why Kristoffer "Kris" Kristofferson never had a professional baseball career. I mean, the guy appeared in Sports Illustrated for his exploits in track and field, football, and rugby while attending Pomona College. He earned a Blue for boxing at Oxford while on a Rhodes Scholarship. He was a helicopter pilot in the Army, an English Professor, and dabbled in singing and acting. A Dodgers uniform really would have helped round out the picture.

Finally, I have an answer as a result of the kind people over at the Situationist pointing me to Robin Turner's recent article on names in Wales Online, excerpted below:

[R]esearch into names at America’s Yale University conducted by Joseph Simmons, assistant professor of marketing, indicates that people subconsciously make decisions based on their names.

In a paper titled Moniker Maladies: When Names Sabotage Success, he says someone called Sandy is, for instance, more likely to buy a Saturn (a type of car), move to San Diego, and marry someone called Sandler.

A person called Richard, he argues, is more likely to buy a Renault, move to Richmond, and marry Ricarda. He said,”This phenomenon is called the name letter effect (NLE), and appears to be an unconscious effect.”

In America, baseball strikeouts are represented by a K and he found batters with K initials struck out more often than others.

Similarly, he discovered C or D initialled students tended to have lower exam results than A or B initialled students.

Mr Simmons says future parents should consider the name-letter effect but shouldn’t panic. He told a conference in the US, “I will be the first to admit that the effects that we have observed are quite small, and so there’s no need to panic if you recently named your child Christine or Diana.”

Sure, the effects are quite small so maybe Kris's nonexistent baseball career had more to do with genetics than his name -- maybe he just didn't have the right DNA for success. Unfortunately, we may never know: Kris's siblings are named Karen Kristofferson Kirschenbauer and Kraigher Kristofferson, and neither ever played in the majors.