The longest last name starting pitcher matchup ever is a true tongue twister
Spencer Schwellenbach vs. Simeon Woods Richardson. If you were perusing the probables and came across that starting pitcher matchup for Tuesday's Braves-Twins game, you might have thought it was a bit of a mouthful. And you would have been exactly right.
But this collision of Wheel of Fortune and baseball worlds is more than just an opportunity to buy a vowel (or a few of them). According to research from Elias, it is the longest last name starting pitcher matchup on record with 28 letters between the two (15 for Woods Richardson and 13 for Schwellenbach).
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The previous high was 25 total letters, per Elias, which has occurred four times and involved Woods Richardson twice (once against the Astros' Spencer Arrighetti and once against the Pirates' Carmen Mlodzinski). The other two were William VanLandingham (SF) against Jason Isringhausen (NYM) in 1996 and Fritz Ostermueller (PIT) against Ken Raffensberger (PHI) in 1944. Say all those five times fast.
Until the debut of Cincinnati's Christian Encarnacion-Strand in 2023, Woods Richardson held the title of the longest full name in baseball history at 22 characters. The young Reds slugger only includes Encarnacion on the back of his jersey, though, while Woods Richardson's uniform features every character. The Minnesota pitcher joked about how it would look ahead of his big league debut back in 2022.
“I could already envision it,” Woods Richardson said. “I already know it's going to go from love handle to love handle.”
In case you were wondering, the record for the shortest last name starting pitcher matchup is six letters, which has happened numerous times per Elias, including twice this year (Luis Gil vs. Colin Rea and Robbie Ray vs. Bryan Woo). For that record to be broken, we'd need to see at least one pitcher with a two-letter last name take the mound as a starter. Here's hoping Woo-Suk Go, currently in the Minors with the Marlins, gets a callup and a start as the opener one day in the future.