How They Got the Nickname: Little Potato
February 23rd, 2012 by slangon
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think a fascinating book would be one which chronicles professional athletes with cool nicknames and explains how or why they got that nickname. Maybe this won’t end up as a book, but I can sure as hell do a series of blog posts on the subject, right?
I’ll start with the man who started this crazy train of though in my head – Camilo Pasqual.
Camilo Alberto (Lus) Pascual was also known as “Little Potato”. I found this out by looking at his Baseball-Reference page, which is usually pretty good about providing player’s nicknames. What they’re not so good at is saying why those players are called that. After digging around the internet a bit, I found out that Camilo had an older brother, Carlos Pascual, whose nickname was Potato, hence Camilo became known as “Little Potato”.
Problem solved, except now why was Carlos Pascual known as “Potato”?
Well, it turns out that Carlos was not a very big man. His Baseball-Reference page lists him as being 5’6″, although there seems to be some doubt as to whether or not he was actually even that tall. Apparently, in Spanish slang, the word for short is “patato”. I guess once a bunch of American ballplayers start using your Spanish nickname of Patato, it doesn’t take too long for that to turn into Potato. Once people took to calling Camilo “Little Potato”, Carlos’ nickname morphed into “Big Potato”, which I guess means “Big Shorty”.
What’s really ironic, though, is that Camilo was 5’11”.
[…] was known as “Big Potato” and naturally his younger brothers, Camilo, was “Little Potato” because of course. Camilo, who […]