The 2022 MLB Draft is over, and that means it's time to rank some names of draftees – 10 names, to be precise, all lovingly curated based on the richness of their implications. Yes, we have done the yeoman's work of giving expert and thorough consideration to the entire database of 616 names. What follows is our authoritative ordering of those names.
We're also listing each young man's draft position and newfound employer, so that, if you wish, you may verify that, yes, this person exists and lives and breathes among us and makes us better as a people. We have also taken the liberty of telling you what each evokes within the imagination -- i.e., what each name sounds like. We come not to mock, but rather to celebrate and in most instances envy.
Let us proceed and do so in descending order for purposes of increasing narrative tension.
10. Cooper Hjerpe, Cardinals, No. 22 overall
Sounds like: Scandinavian architect of Brutalist modular fraternity houses. Most commonly used interior grace note was a trough-style urinal shaped like a napping technocrat and vending machines that alternately dispensed cold cans of Natty Light and concrete blocks engraved with cryptic dystopian warnings.
9. Silas Ardoin, Orioles, No. 107 overall
Sounds like: Puritan village elder who claimed to be able to identify witches with a divining rod. Would neglect farm duties so as to practice speaking tongues in the hayloft, which led to multiple crop failures and localized famine. Will assure his wife Amity that what she just heard in the middle of the night "'tis merely the wind" moments before being disemboweled in his marital bed by a bipedal goat with flaming horns and pentagram eyes.
8. Cutter Coffey, Red Sox, No. 41 overall
Sounds like: Destitute crypto investor who, under cover of night, is working piecemeal to enclose the entire state of Oklahoma in high-tensile wire fencing with designs on one day selling admission tickets to "The World's Only and Largest Tornado Ranch."
7. A.J. Blubaugh, Astros, No. 223 overall
Sounds like: Guinness Book of World Records record holder for most times having successfully sped away from a routine traffic stop in a 1988 Monte Carlo with dealer plates after first popping the hood just to raise the difficulty level. Did so 34 times over a seven-year period.
6. Jimmy Crooks III, Cardinals, No. 127 overall
Sounds like: Forty-three-year-old local bad seed who has fired a potato cannon from a highway overpass once a week since the fall of his junior year of high school. "The adult to come is surely to be found within the seeds of youth," he tells the court at every monthly arraignment. Unmoved, circuit court Judge Hugh Pinkney (Padres, No. 510 overall) at last sentenced him to home confinement and monitoring for six months. "Joke's on you," Blubaugh said. "I live in a van."
"Hmm," said Judge Pinkney. "Does the van have curtains?"
"Damn right."
"Rear-mounted aluminum ladder?"
"Only way I can get to the potato cannon that's strap-bolted to the roof."
"Case dismissed. Lemme see what that van can do."
5. Orion Kerkering, Phillies, No. 152 overall
Sounds like: Tenured chaos theorist whose favored pejorative and expressions of surprise are, respectively, "rat-fink" and "gadzooks." Also a personal trainer to asteroids.
4. Tanner O'Tremba, Giants, No. 466 overall
Sounds like: Colloquial term for spending the three granted wishes from a genie on two pool cues and a hot plate that can plug into a 12-volt cigarette-lighter socket. One of the pool cues is then used, for purposes of robbery, to impale the genie, who turns out to be a costumed Chuck Cuckles, host of the hidden-camera reality TV show, Oh Golly!.
3. Roman Phansalkar, Angels, No. 208 overall
Sounds like: Terminally shirtless psychiatrist on the short-lived ABC soap opera Cash, Weaponry, Bedrooms, and Betrayals Involving Each of Those Things. Therapy sessions inevitably contrived their way to the erotically suggestive against a green-screen backdrop of the sun-dappled Adriatic.
2. Gary Gill Hill, Rays, No. 194 overall
Sounds like: East Tennessee song-and-dance man who spent two seasons as semi-regular on the American variety television show Hee Haw with a bolo tie made from a dried human ear. Later fired from a series of gospel quartets for his heretical insistence that Christ played college football in the 1970s.
1. Zebulon Vermillion, Mets, No. 299 overall
Sounds like: Inbound sentient asteroid with a Gloucestershire accent, one thousand legs, and two thousand completely ripped quads. The latter quality – i.e., the ripped quads – is owing to his training sessions with Orion Kerkering in which he pushed a weighted sled around the fitness track (incorrectly identified as "rings" by the earthbound) that encircles Saturn. Two thousand sets of 1,000. One thousand sets of 2,000 during the de-loading phase.
