But what about Steve Balboni and Harold Reynolds?

According to a forthcoming academic paper, one of the reasons Dave Kingman struck out a lot is that his last name started with "K".

No, really.

The study, by Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons, says that batters whose names started with "K" struck out 18.8% of the time, as compared to only 17.2% for everyone else. That result is statistically significant, the authors say.

Also, students whose names begin with "C" and "D" are more likely to get Cs and Ds, especially if they say they like their initials. And the November 19 issue of Sports Illustrated also points out (page 30) the connection between Barry Bonds' initials and one of his all-time records.

The paper will appear in "Psychological Science." Any sabermetrically-inclined psychologists with access to this paper should feel free to send it along when it comes out.

------

UPDATE: in the comments, Tango points to a post by David Gassko, who ran a similar study for all the letters of the alphabet. Gassko found that some letters are even more strikeout-prone than K.

(By the way, the reason the results are statistically significant is that the null hypothesis -- that players whose names start with J have exactly the same skills as players whose names don't start with J -- is false.)