The Chronicle is running a fan survey on the best San Francisco Giants nickname ever, prompted by the debut of rookie lefty Matt "Tugboat" Wilkinson. The museum-correct answer is the Say Hey Kid, and it always will be. But the survey is really asking a better question than it knows: what makes a baseball nickname real? The good ones are never designed by a marketing department — they're bestowed, by a father or a family friend or a bored teammate, and they usually commemorate something a little unflattering. By that standard the most Giants nickname on the whole ballot belongs to a 23-year-old who got it because he couldn't run.

There's a survey going around this week — the Chronicle is asking readers for the best San Francisco Giants nickname of all time (external source, opens in a new tab) — and the honest thing to admit up front is that the survey has a right answer and it isn't interesting. The right answer is the Say Hey Kid. It's Willie Mays. It will be Willie Mays in 2050, when everyone reading this is dead and the franchise is playing home games on the moon. You do not need me to tell you the greatest center fielder who ever lived had the greatest nickname. That's not a take. That's a plaque.

So let me argue the more interesting thing the survey is actually asking without meaning to, which is: what makes a baseball nickname real?

Here is my whole thesis, and I'll spend the rest of this defending it. A real nickname is bestowed, not branded. It comes from somebody who knew you before you were good. It usually memorializes something faintly embarrassing. And it survives not because a team store printed it on a t-shirt but because people who love you kept saying it out loud until it calcified into your actual name. The marketing department can sell a nickname. It cannot make one. And the reason the Giants have one of the deepest nickname benches in the sport is that this is an organization with a long institutional memory and a booth that treated the spoken word as sacred.

Consider the canon, and notice how few of them a brand manager would have signed off on.

Willie McCovey was Stretch — because he was a long-limbed first baseman who reached, not because it tested well. Orlando Cepeda was the Baby Bull, inherited from his father Perucho, the "Bull" of Puerto Rican baseball, and also Cha-Cha, which is a nickname about a man's music taste, which is somehow perfect. Juan Marichal was the Dominican Dandy, alliteration doing the work sportswriters used to do before we all got self-conscious. Will Clark was Will the Thrill, the rare one that sounds like branding but wasn't — it rhymed itself into existence off a sweet swing and a scowl.

And then the modern ones, which are better evidence for my point, not worse. Tim Lincecum was The Freak, because his delivery was a biomechanical crime, and Big Time Timmy Jim, which is the sound of a clubhouse loving a guy. Pablo Sandoval is the Kung Fu Panda — a nickname a marketing team would never have dared pitch, calling your young Latino star a panda, and yet Pablo embraced it, put the panda hats in every section, and made it his own. Brian Wilson was just The Beard, a nickname that was also a personality disorder. Madison Bumgarner was MadBum, a portmanteau so good it made him sound meaner than a control lefty from North Carolina had any right to sound.

Now hold all of that up against the one name that isn't on the ballot for a reason, and tell me it doesn't prove the rule. The greatest player this franchise has employed since it moved west — the guy I will defend in this space until they revoke my login — never got a cuddly nickname to stick. Barry Bonds was Barry. He was Bonds. People tried, nothing took, and I've always thought that was the tell: a nickname is a form of affection a clubhouse and a city grant you, and the thing about Barry was that greatness that large doesn't get diminished into a cute two-syllable pet name. You don't nickname the monument. You just say the name.

And a family friend named Phil McNeil started calling him a tugboat — a boat built to tow bigger ships, slow but useful, chugging along — and his father Gavin would holler "Tugboat, toot toot!"

Which brings me, finally and inevitably, to the tugboat.

Matt Wilkinson is a 23-year-old left-hander the Giants pried out of Cleveland back in May in the Patrick Bailey trade — a guy who throws from a low slot with weird ride, and by his own telling didn't even know the pitch was any good until pro-ball tracking data told him so. He got the call to the big club in mid-August and threw two scoreless innings against the Guardians — his old organization — a couple of nights later. Perfectly nice rookie story. Happens twenty times a summer around the league.

But here's the nickname, and here's why it's the most Giants thing on the whole survey. As a kid, Wilkinson was slow. Not fast. Bad on the bases. And a family friend named Phil McNeil started calling him a tugboat — a boat built to tow bigger ships, slow but useful, chugging along — and his father Gavin would holler "Tugboat, toot toot!" to get him moving around the bags. That's the origin. A dad and his buddy needling a slow kid to hustle. It rode with him through his Little League days — he's Canadian — and up through the minors, and when he says he's embraced it ever since, you believe him, because you cannot fake a nickname that old.

That is a bestowed nickname in its purest form. Nobody designed it. It commemorates a weakness. It was kept alive for fifteen years by people who loved him going toot toot until it became load-bearing, until the wire services and the Giants' own call-up announcement printed "Tugboat" like it was on his birth certificate. It is the exact opposite of a brand, and it is now, improbably, on a big-league roster in San Francisco.

And doesn't it fit? This is a team whose entire 2026 identity is grinding out one-run games, winning ugly, taking a 1-0 opener like it's the whole season in miniature. A tugboat is not the yacht. A tugboat is the unglamorous, low-to-the-water, absolutely necessary craft that does the hard pulling in the fog while the pretty boats get photographed. If you were going to invent a mascot-animal for this specific Giants team — patient, unsexy, quietly indispensable — you would invent a tugboat, and you would be too on-the-nose to publish it. Instead a slow kid already lived it.

So put the Say Hey Kid at the top of your ballot. That's the correct museum answer and I'm not fighting the Louvre. But if the question is which nickname best captures what this franchise actually is — bestowed by family, born from a flaw, kept alive by affection until it turned real, and now chugging out of the bullpen in the middle of a stubborn little pennant push — then the best Giants nickname isn't the fastest guy who ever played here.

It's the slowest.

One housekeeping note, because it belongs in any essay about who keeps these names alive: the reason the Giants' spoken lexicon runs this deep is that for forty years two guys in a booth treated it like an oral tradition, and one of them is calling his last season now (external source, opens in a new tab). Nicknames don't survive on merchandise. They survive because somebody says them, night after night, until the city says them back. Somebody said Tugboat, toot toot for fifteen years. That's the whole trick. That's the only trick there is.