My Favorite Names of the 2025 MLB Draft
Plus some thoughts on baseball's preponderance of Cades and Cadens
The MLB Draft took place on Sunday and Monday, and per usual, it featured hundreds of the most sunburned and shaggy-haired 19-year-olds in America being assigned by the cold unfeeling hand of a lottery to the 29 major league teams and also the Rockies. As is also often the case, many of these youths bear some of the goofiest names in the entire world; the correlation between “star-level amateur athlete” and “has a name that makes you feel like you’re having a stroke” is rather high.
I’m sure there’s some kind of sociological explanation for why so many athletes have names that are both distinct and bonkers, but seeing as how I’m not Matt Yglesias, I’m not going to bother making up a reasoning for it. Instead, as I’ve done in years previous on the internet, I wanted to highlight my favorite names of the draft.1
Kruz Schoolcraft
Some are calling it “the most San Diego name that has ever existed.”
Slater de Brun
Dax Kilby
This current generation of ballplayers has made a potential “X Games competitor or 2020s MLB draft pick” quiz a nightmare to contemplate.
Murf Gray
INT.: HOSPITAL DELIVERY ROOM
MURF GRAY’S MOTHER: Honey, our son is here — our beautiful son. What should we name this brilliant miracle of ours?
MURF GRAY’S FATHER: [mouth full of marshmallows] Murf
Taitn Gray
Gabel Pentecost
I don’t know what exactly would compel a parent to saddle their child with a name that looks like an autocorrect typo, though I have a sneaking suspicion that the parents of Taitn Gray — and as far as I can tell, that’s his honest-to-God given name — were aiming for “Titan” and landed about a hundred miles off target. Bless them for sticking with it, I suppose.
Easton Carmichael
FUN FACT: There were more draft picks this year named Easton (2) than there were named David, Mark, or Paul (0).
Landyn Vidourek
Kayson Cunningham
Kyson Witherspoon
Korbyn Dickerson
Kaemyn Franklin
Caedmon Parker
Kamden Edge
The humble Y does a lot of work in the field of alternative name spellings. Consult any Utah high school yearbook at random, for example, and you’ll find an army of Ys spliced into otherwise bland Zoomer names. The intended effect is similar to adding a bay leaf to a soup, though in this case the bay leaf is the size of an iPhone and also the entire soup is bay leaves. The same goes for homonymous consonants and accidental diphthongs, scattered willy-nilly into birth certificates across the country.
The MLB Draft, populated as it is by the teens and college kids of the Sun Belt and Deep South, is rife with tortured Y insertions, superfluous AEs, and (ironically or fittingly depending on the player’s position, given its prominence in baseball symbology) the letter K. In the hunt to differentiate their brood, the parents of these children are in the process of creating a new and purely American linguistics — one built on the premise that individuality stems not from the person, but from spelling, or at least from the idea that there is no rule that cannot be broken in the search for something recognizable yet unique. I would hate to be the Starbucks barista who pulls the order from these young men.
Kailen Hamson
I’m separating young Kailen from the rest of his similarly named ilk because he’s from Australia, aka Missouri with a beach, and is thus a legally distinct and separate entity from his American counterparts.
Briggs McKenzie
Paxton Kling
Kerrington Cross
Shane Van Dam
Dusty Revis
River Hamilton
McLane Moody
Steele Hall
Shoutout to the parents who, bereft of name ideas and unwilling to subject their child to the mundanity of being “Albert” or “Richard” or “Peter,” instead grab the nearest dime store cowboy or spy novel and flip through it until they find something suitably badass. You would never fuck with a guy named “Shane Van Dam” or “Steele Hall” unless you absolutely had to, and if you did, you would do so knowing full well that your ass is grass.
Pico Kohn
Pierce Coppola
Coy James
Trendan Parish
Truitt Madonna
Meridian Leffew
Griffin Hugus
Maximus Martin
My favorite names in the draft (aside from perfect absurdities like “Truck Franklin” or whatever) are the ones that could easily slide into a Thomas Pynchon novel without notice. They always carry a wonderful daffiness about them, somehow both plausible and insane, like a rollercoaster of letters. If I were a fiction writer, they would humble and enrage me; how could I ever come up with anything as funny as what reality has dumped in my lap?
Richie Bonomolo Jr.
Bonus points that a guy with a tertiary Sopranos character name is not just from the Bronx but was also drafted by the Yankees; at least a fifth of all Yankees fans are named “Richie Bonomolo Jr.”
Talon Haley
Callan Fang
FANTASY WRITER STRUGGLING TO COME UP WITH NAMES FOR WEREWOLF CHARACTERS: Uhhhhhhh “Talon Haley” and “Callan Fang,” boom, it’s lunch time.
Maison Martinez
There’s a fine line when joking about names and spelling between celebrating the accidentally sublime and punching down on those who have the misfortune of a moniker that neither man nor God can comprehend. That having been said, it kills me that the parents of Maison Martinez, presumably in an attempt to differentiate him from the slew of Masons in the world2, accidentally named him “French House.”
Cannon Peebles
Cannon Pickell
These are the two greatest names in American history.
Kade Anderson
Caden Bodine
Cade Obermueller
Cade Crossland
Kade Snell
Caden Hunter
Kaiden Wilson
Kade Woods
Kaden Echeman
Cade Fisher
Kade Brown
Kaeden Kent
Of the 615 players drafted this year, 12, or 1.9%, were some variation on Cade or Caden. That’s not the highest total for one name (sort of) in the draft; there were 14 Lukes selected and 12 Matt/Matthews, for example. But this uniquely Zoomer name is far and away one of the most popular for ballplayers. Josh, Jacob, Michael, Daniel, William, Max, Brandon, Andrew — none of these names that you’ll find or hear over and over again in the English-speaking world can come close in the world of Gen Z baseball to Cade and its many imitations.3
This is a statistical trend, if you can call it that, that isn’t visible in the population at large. On the list of the 200 most popular baby names for boys of the 2000s (which is the decade that all of these picks were born in), you don’t hit “Caden” until no. 112, then “Kaden” at 118, and that’s it. “Brayden,” “Hayden,” “Jaden,” “Jayden” and “Aiden” are all higher on the list, and kids with those names outnumber “Caden/Kaden” almost five-to-one. But in total, those five names made up 14 picks of the 2025 crop. Why is “Caden/Kaden/etc.” so dominant in the draft?
Again, I’m not Matt Yglesias, so I won’t deign to make up a reason and then act like it’s a fact. Besides, I prefer the mystery of it.
These are just names of the kids who got drafted; there are almost 2,000 draft-eligible players who didn’t get selected, and while that’s a treasure trove of names on its own, well, it’s 2,000 names.
There were nine Masons drafted this year, including, oddly, four within eight picks of each other in the fourth round.
To wit: there are eight players named Cade, Kade or Caden in MLB right now, all of whom debuted in the league in or after 2022 and all of whom were born in or after 1997, the first year of Generation Z. (To them, you can add at least a dozen minor leaguers in that same age range.) There are more Cades/Kades/Cadens in the majors then there are Zachs, Aarons, Daniels, and Brandons, to name a few.