Will the name Adley — which has been trendy for baby girls recently — start seeing more usage among baby boys? Particularly among baby boys in Maryland?
I ask because a recent Baltimore Sun article listed three Maryland babies who were born this year to Orioles fans and named after young Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman:
- Trevor Adley Thompson (boy)
- Adley Kenney (girl)
- Grayson Adley Shepke (boy)
Admittedly, the two boys were given Adley as a middle name. But I’m sure other boys will get it as a first name following the team’s impressive 2023 season. (One expectant family mentioned in the article is considering using the name for their son, due in January.)
Other Orioles players who might be influencing baby names this year include third baseman/shortstop Gunnar Henderson, outfielder Cedric Mullins, and pitchers Grayson Rodriguez and Félix Bautista.
A former player who had a discernible influence on U.S. baby names several decades ago is Calvin “Cal” Ripkin, Jr., who was with the Orioles for his entire career (from 1981 to 2001).
P.S. Female country singer Adley Stump, who participated in the second season of The Voice, helped popularize the name Adley for baby girls in the early 2010s.
Update, Jan. 2024: The first baby born at the University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center (UM BWMC) in 2024 was a girl named Adley Michelle Jobst. The Oriole Bird (the baseball team’s mascot) paid a visit to the Jobst family in mid-January.
Sources:
- Gruskin, Abigail. “The Orioles’ season left its mark on baby names. Could another awesome year birth more Adleys, Gunnars, Cedrics and Félixes?” Baltimore Sun 13 Oct. 2023.
- Adley Rutschman – Wikipedia
- Meet Adley Michelle Jobst, the First Baby Born at UM Baltimore Washington Medical Center in 2024
Image: Adapted from Adley Rutschman by Keith Allison under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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The email I got that alerted me to this post had a different title — it replaced Cal with Brooks. I am hoping that a lot of Baltimore (my hometown) babies will be named Brooks in the coming year, because it’s one of my favorite boys’ names, and the wonderful O’s 3rd baseman (’55-’77) Brooks Robinson passed away in September this year. We miss him.
Go O’s!
I changed the title soon after the post went live — sorry about that.
I’d mentioned Brooks Robinson in an early draft of the post, but decided to leave him out after I couldn’t find a correlation between the high points of his career the usage of his name. He’s certainly got namesakes today, but it doesn’t look like he had a strong influence on baby names back when he was playing.
We will definitely be on the lookout for a bump in the usage of Brooks (particularly in MD) in 2023/2024.