How They Got the Nickname: Oil Can
April 4th, 2012 by slangon

One of my favorite things about the history of baseball, is how awesome some of the nicknames players have sported throughout the years are. Some nicknames are pretty self explanatory, like when a southpaw is named “Lefty” or a guy from Texas is called “Tex”. I’ve always been intrigued by nicknames that are a little harder to comprehend, so I tried to go out and find why those guys are called what they’re called.

Dennis Boyd hails from Meridian, Mississippi, where beer was known colloquially as “oil”. Apparently Boyd was so often seen with an “oil can” in his hand that folks took to referring to him as such.

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