It all comes down to a baseball player from the 1920s. Stay with us here
Out of all the fevered predictions that gathered around the long-awaited
ending of Succession, there was one that gained a lot of traction online a few days before the 90-minute finale.
While a TikTok by a baby-naming website wouldn’t usually be the first port of call in foretelling the fate of a much-loved HBO series, in 2023, that’s just where we’re at. What’s more, it proved to be spot-on.
Sophie, the editor-in-chief from Nameberry, uploaded the video four days ago and went deep on the names of some of the most prominent characters in the series:
Starting with Shiv, which can also mean “to knife” (which also proved to be deeply prophetic) she then moved on to good old Tom Wambsgans, noting, as many of us have, that it’s a highly unusual name.
That it comes from the German name comprised of Wambs (from wamba, which means big paunch) and gans (goose) is almost by the by, as the real point of interest falls at the feet of a real-life historical baseball player named Bill Wambsganss.
Prolific as a professional in the 1920s, Wambsganss played for the Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, and Philadelphia Athletics, but he became famous for one particular move in 1920.
He pulled off what’s known as an unassisted triple play, where a defensive player makes all three outs by himself in one continuous play, without assistance from their teammates. The New York Times explained: “The play gave Wambsganss a level of notoriety that eclipsed anything else about his career, or even his life despite his having gone on to manage in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
As Sophie herself wondered out loud: “It’s no coincidence that Tom shares a surname with Bill Wambsganss, so you have to wonder if Tom will complete an unassisted triple play and take out all three of the Roy siblings to become the leader of Waystar Royco finale.”
And… that’s exactly what happened. “YOU WERE RIGHT IM SCREAMING” one TikTok user commented while another, much like that Major League Baseball match move, said: “Dammit that was a great call”.
Now, all that’s left for Nameberry is to tell us how many people have called their babies Shiv, Roman, Kendall or Connor – or even Logan – following the ending of the series. Their story might have finished, but the next generation Succession-hive lives on.
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