I’ve had this idea for a while, so just humour me. Say you’re dragged into a fantasy draft for the 2006 Broward County High-School Basketball League. You know absolutely nothing about the players. You’re not even from Broward. And all I do is give you a list of names without any stats or height/weight numbers. You’ve got the first pick in the draft and you figure you might as well take one of the first two names on your list.

The first two players are named Mitchell Applebaum, and Michael Jordan. Who are you going to take?

A Rose by any other name, would still be Jalen or Malik. But can you make money drafting your fantasy teams based on names? It’s a strategy that doesn’t really work for major league players. We all know we want the biggest names on our team; guys like A-Rod, Pujols, and Clemens.

But when combing through minor-league prospect charts, evaluating names can actually yield results.

I took a look at David Luciani’s Top 100 Prospects over at Baseballnotebook.com and applied my name theory. I rarely agree with any of Luciani’s prospect projections, and neither should you. But he does give us a pretty good avenue for evaluating young talent: their names.

Luciani’s Top 10 are:

1. Daric Barton
2. Delmon Young
3. Hunter Pence
4. Travis Denker
5. Billy Butler
6. BJ Upton
7. Jeremy Hermida
8. Javier Herrera
9. Mike Carp
10. Marcus Sanders

Here is where you’re going to start calling me an idiot. “How can you project performance based on names?” Well let’s take a look at Luciani’s past prospect sheets.

In 2003 Luciani published a list of his Top 100 hitting prospects. The Top 10 were guys like Andy Marte, Prince Fielder, Joe Mauer, etc…But 1 player hasn’t made it to the bigs, or even looked like a big-time prospect. His name: #10, Justin Humphries. Humphries hit .269 for the SAL Lexington Legends last year with 9 HRs in 62 games. Some other no-namers from the list: Brent Colamarino, Donald Murphy, Kila Kaaihue, Chad Spann.

On the pitching side: Think Lenny Dinardo’s going to win you a championship? Luciani had him listed ahead of good names like Bobby Jenks, John Patterson, and Ervin Santana.

So what’s my point: Well as crazy as it sounds, Brandon Wood is better than Bob Keppel. And you would never draft a guy named Kevin Melillo. It’s the reason why the Top 10 pitchers in the MLB have names like Santana, Oswalt, Clemens, Pedro, Hudson, and Prior. I’m sorry, but do you really think Wandy Morla’s going to be leading a league near you soon?

Of course, where this strategy really works well is picking guys who ACTUALLY make it to the majors. Josh Towers is a solid name, but he’s also a solid 5th starter. Am I the only one who thought the names Tomko or Hendrickson were going to yield results? But at least those guys made it to the majors. As far as big-league washouts go, you’ve got Darwin Cubillan, Jung Bong, Chris Bootcheck, Pedro Bordon.

The name-game only really works in baseball, where goofy names abound. Try it in the NFL or NBA and you’ll find that everyone’s got a cool handle. Rock Cartwright, or Duce Staley. Trajon Langdon, or Kwame Brown. There’s just no way to tell.

But Astros’ minor-league SS Benjamin Zobrist? Sorry, I don’t think it’s happening.