Nekola was a star pitcher at Holy Cross College, and in 1929, at age 22, he made one start and eight relief appearances for the New York Yankees, but didn't get a decision. (He did, however, get two hits in four at bats.) He returned to the minor leagues, making a brief return to the American League in 1933 when he made two relief appearances for the Detroit Tigers.

Nekola was a 6-foot, 170-pound southpaw whose steel-rimmed glasses seem to be mentioned more prominently than his pitching performances, at least in some of the stories I found. That may be understandable, given his pitching record in organized baseball – 51 wins, 86 losses. He never had a winning record, not even in 1932 when he was pitching for the Newark Bears, a New York Yankee farm team that romped to the International League pennant with 109 wins against just 59 losses. Nekola was 6-11 that season.

He was born Francis Joseph Nekola. I've come across no explanation for his nickname. Nor have I found a photo of Nekola and his glasses.

This Ricky Nelson, middle name Lee, was an outfielder for Seattle who played 123 games, almost of them in 1983. His lifetime batting average: .247.

His claim to fame: he is one of a handful of major leaguers who hit a flyball in fair territory that defied gravity. That is, it went up, but never came down. The reason? It happened at the Seattle Kingdome where Nelson's fly ball got stuck in a speaker attached to the ceiling. All the hitter got for his efforts was a foul ball strike.

With Brooklyn (1929-30), Newsom was sent to the Chicago Cubs (1931) then to the St. Louis Browns (1934) and on to the Washington Senators (1935-36), then to the Boston Red Sox (1937), back to St. Louis (1938), then to Detroit (1939-41), back to Washington (1942), back to Brooklyn (the same year), back to St. Louis (1943) and Washington (also 1943), then off to the Philadelphia Athletics (1944-45), back to Washington (1946), then (hurrah!) New York Yankees and a World Series (1947), and then to the New York Giants (1948).

He was out of the majors for awhile, probably resting, then returned in 1952 for his fifth stay with the Washington Senators, who traded him a few weeks later to Philadelphia.

He finally left the majors for good in 1953, the year he celebrated his 46th birthday.

Newsom won 211 major league games, lost 222. He had three straight 20-win seasons, 1938-40, going 21-5 with Tigers in 1940 and winning two games in World Series. In summarizing his career, some like to point out the Louis Norman Newsom served more terms in Washington than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Bridgeport, Connecticut, native spent much of his time in New England since three of his other teams were in Boston, Providence and Worcester. He also pitched in St. Louis and Baltimore, though gaps in his resume (1879 and 1881, for example) indicate he probably was pitching elsewhere in other leagues. His business season was with the St. Louis Brown Stockins in 1877, the second year of the National League's existence, when he won 18 games and lost 23.

One thing that keeps me going on this peculiar exercise to research baseball players with unusual names is I keep finding inrtriguing items about them. A website devoted to sports in Saginaw, Michigan (saginawcountysports.com) has a short piece on a team called the Saginaw Old Golds, champions of the Northwestern League in 1883 and 1884. This piece claims Fred "Tricky" Nichols, apparently a member of the Old Golds, is credited with throwing baseball's first "drop pitch." Research on this piece was done by Richard Curry.

Cut to another item, this one a recap of the 1878 National League season that mentions a game on May 25 when Tricky Nichols of Providence was forced to go the whole nine innings against Boston despite a dislocated finger. He lost the game, 17-10. Could the dislocatsed finger have anything to do with the "drop pitch"? And is that why he was called Tricky?

Most interesting is that Tricky Nichols was a member of the first United States baseball team to visit Cuba. They did it late in 1879 on a junket organized by promoter Frank Bancroft of Cincinnanti and financed by Asa Soule of Rochester, New York. The team was called the Hop Bitters named for a whiskey-laced medicine that Soule was marketing as a cure for most anything. The baseball team played only two games in Cuba, winning both easily, then retreated to New Orleans to spend the rest of the winter. This team then became the Worcester Ruby Legs for the 1880 National League season. I used the word "retreated" because, while they weren't chased out of Cuba, the situation there was tense. Cuba still belonged to Spain at the time – this was several years before the Spanish-American War – and while Cubans apparently liked Americans, the Spanish who controlled the island didn't. And baseball pretty much symbolized America.

Tricky Nichols lived an interesting life, one that unfortunately ended when he was 47.

Nixon's an outfielder who spent several seasons with the Boston Red Sox before moving to the Cleveland Indians in 2007. He moved on to the New York Mets in 2008, but an injury and a hitting slump limited his playing time. He batted only .171 in 35 at bats. He spent most of the season in the Pacific Coast League with two teams that are nowhere near the Pacific coast – Tucson and New Orleans. He batted .319, but when 2009 rolled around there was no major league job waiting for him.

Novikoff was one of a few softball stars to make the switch to baseball. He put up big hitting numbers in the minor leagues, but his fielding was a problem, especially during home games for the Cubs. Seems he wouldn't chase fly balls past the warning track because he was convinced the vines that grew on Wrigley Field's fence were poison ivy. It is said that at times even Novikoff's wife booed his outfield play.

Former minor league infielder and manager Mickey Weintraub, writing in Elysian Fields Quarterly, recalls a game against Novikoff in the Pacific Coast League:

"Novikoff hit a line drive that barely glanced off the glove of the diving left fielder. It was definitely a hit, but there was some margin for error. As Novikoff dusted himself off after sliding into second base (where I was covering), he whispered to me, 'Hey kid, check the scoreboard. Did they give me a hit or an error?' He wasn't about to look at the scoreboard himself. 'Sorry, it's an error,' I said, feigning innocence. Novikoff raged. 'That bleepin' scorer is trying to keep me in the minors forever.' When I finally told him I had 'misread' the scoreboard and that he had really gotten a hit, he acted like a little kid at a birthday party - though careful to keep his back to the scoreboard."