A Primer on “International” Last Names
By Mike SanClemente - Managing Editor
05/21/2007
GREATER CONNECTICUT (Aboard the Amtrak Acela route from NY Penn Station to Boston) –
The presiding belief in the olden days was that the world was flat. Then it was generally agreed the world was round, but these days it appears to have reverted back to being flat again.
You can fly almost anywhere in the world in 12 hours, mixing of cultures is becoming more common, not less so, and the best way for any company to grow sales is to expand internationally rather than just sell more in its home country.
What does all this mean? These are merely a few of the tangential reasons why there are so many foreign-born players in the big leagues today, something for which I gained appreciation while attending 3 World Baseball Classic games last March. No, I didn’t get to see Dice-K, but I did see Akinori Iwamura, and many others who may one day find themselves in the American big leagues.
One of the most interesting aspects of these games was the last names of the players. And so it goes, when you see a player in the bigs whose name you’re unfamiliar with, wouldn’t you at least like to know what country he’s from?
Most of what I write about below has to do with Asian players, as Hispanic ones are generally easy enough to identify since we have so many in the bigs, and at the moment there are precious few players from, say, Belgium, Russia, Senegal, Egypt, or any other non-Asian, non-Spanish-speaking country, making it easy to rule out those countries from consideration.
There is no longer any show on television named “Alias Smith and Jones,” a name derived from what was believed to be the most common last names in the US at the time of the show. These are obviously no longer the most common last names. For the moment I don’t have the Internet in front of me, so I can’t confirm, but I’d have to say Nguyen (Vietnamese), Wang (Chinese), Lee (Korean), Rodriguez/Gonzalez/Hernandez (Hispanic), and possibly Patel (Indian) could comprise a good chunk of the top ten last names in this country.
So, when you see a player, you may ask yourself, “How did he get here?” or more appropriately, “What country does he come from?” Here’s a way for you to tell, and also to win a few bets next time you’re at the ballpark:
Nationality #1, Korean:
Three names usually equals Korean heritage.
Jae Weong Seo? Hee Seop Choi? Byung-Hyun Kim? Chan Ho Park? Three names all. All from Korea.
The only exception that comes to mind at the moment is New York’s Chien-Ming Wang, who hails from Taiwan.
The Korean national team in the World Baseball Classic had a lineup with someone named Lee batting in the leadoff, 3, cleanup, and 6 positions! Given that people from other nations clearly haven’t married into the Korean culture at the same rate they have in many other countries, it means that most of their last names remain the same.
With so many similar last names, I had to explore further. According to a Korean I spoke to at the Korea/Japan game, “In Korea, what sets you apart is your middle name.” And then it clicked: with tons of repeated last names on the Korean national roster, like Lee and Kim, and a few repeated first names, alas the only names that seemed to be entirely unique were the middle ones.
Nationality #2, Japanese:
Use the “Italian” rule with Japanese: do both of his names end in a vowel?
Daisuke Matsuzaka? Ichiro Suzuki? Hideo Nomo? Hideki Matsui? Kazuo Matsui? Tadahito Iguchi? Akinori Otsuka? Shigetoshi Hasegawa? Tsuyoshi Shinjo? All Japanese.
Nationality #3, Cuban:
If the player’s last name is not Asian or Caucasian, or a Hispanic one you recognize, there’s a good chance he’s Cuban.
I hate to give such a vague directive, but Cuban last names are, at least to me, almost completely unique. At the Cuba/Dominican Republic game, the Cuban team had almost an entire roster of last names I’d never seen before (again, because Cubans – other than south Florida and New York city – largely haven’t integrated into other countries that I’m exposed to, making them tougher for me to recognize). Sure, Orlando and Livan Hernandez are from Cuba and have easily-recognized last names, but so are Jose Contreras, Rene Arocha, and others whose last names are generally unfamiliar to us Americans.
That’s it. Hardly an encyclopedia of knowledge, but at your next game, make a bet with the guy sitting next to you. Whoever can name more countries of origin of the foreign-born players at the park that night gets a free hot dog, paid for by the other guy.
My money’s on you.