If you’re name is Aaron Abrams, this Sliver’s for you.

From the land of over-reaching research comes a doozy. The folks at Psychological Science Magazine have published a report suggesting that a person’s initials may have a direct impact on their fate in life. They did an analysis of Major League Baseball records from 1913 to 2006, and noticed that players who have a first or last name starting with “K” had a higher likelihood to strike out (that’s a K in baseball speak) than players with other initials. (We’re thinking Dave Kingman’s strikeout total alone may have caused the skew.) Furthermore, a study of graduate students’ test scores reveals that people whose names start with C or D scored lower on tests than students whose names start with A or B.

Are you creeped out? It’s worse than you think. The research further suggests that the effect works in the negative, but not in the positive. Having a name tied to “easy to achieve negative outcomes” may hurt you, but having initials tied to “hard-to-achieve positive outcomes” may not help. So if you name your kid Ferdinand, you may want him to end up as a Financier, but he’s more likely to be a Failure. (Or, more personally, “Mike Keeler” is more likely to be a Mediocre Kleptomaniac than a Marketing Kingpin.) In other words, don’t dream about what you want your kid to become, worry about what you DON’T want your kid to be. Make a list of all the letters with possible negative connotations in life.  And don’t use them!

This is published research, so it must be true. Nevertheless, we had our doubts.

Until we noticed the authors of the study are Joseph Simmons (“Joke Scientist”) and Leif Nelson (“Lamebrained Nincompoop”).

Hey, it works!