Bubba Crosby

Richard Stephen "Bubba" Crosby (born August 11, 1976) is a former Major League Baseball outfielder who played with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees. He is best known for his tenure as a backup outfielder for the Yankees, when his defense and running games were often put to use and he played a prominent starting role near the end of the 2005 season.

Name

He became Bubba when he was born and his 15-month-old sister, Charmin, could not say "brother". The name stuck. But as he said, "almost everyone in Texas is Bubba when you're growing up." He said when he got to be dating age, "I tried to change it in school, call myself Richard, but kids would call for me and ask for Richard, and my parents would burst out laughing and say, 'You mean Bubba?'"

High school and college

Crosby was a star at baseball powerhouse Bellaire High School (Bellaire, Texas) 1991-95, where he won a Texas 5-A sports state high school championship.

At Rice University from 1996 to 1998, he earned All-American honors in 1997 and 1998. In 1998, he hit 25 home runs and drove in 91 runs in only 221 at bats, and batted .394 with a .504 on-base percentage and a .828 slugging percentage. He also had a 30-game hitting streak. He is the all-time Rice leader with 20 career triples, and 2nd with 59 home runs, 243 RBIs, 499 total bases, and a .737 slugging percentage, trailing only Lance Berkman in each category.

Bubba

In American usage, bubba is a relationship nickname formed from brother and given to boys, especially eldest male siblings, to indicate their role in a family. For some boys and men, bubba is used so pervasively that it replaces the given name...The nickname may also be used outside the family by friends as a term of endearment.

The linguist Ian Hancock has described similarities between the African language Krio and Gullah, the creole language of African-Americans in the isolated Sea Islands of South Carolina and points out that the Krio expression bohboh (boy) appears in Gullah as buhbuh, which may account for the "bubba" of the American South. (http://www.yale.edu/glc/gullah/06.htm)

Robert Ferguson notes in his “English Surnames”’; Bubba corresponds with the German bube, a boy. This matches Saxon and Hibernian tradition.

Because of its association with the southern part of the United States, bubba is also often used outside the South as a pejorative to mean a person of low economic status and limited education. Bubba may also be taken to mean one who is a "good ol' boy." In the US Army and Marines, bubba can mean a lay soldier, similar to grunt but with connotations of endearment instead of derision (e.g., "Can you make that device easier to work with, 'cus every bubba is gonna have to use it.").

Bubba (fish)

Bubba (c. 1982 – August 22, 2006) was a Queensland grouper who resided at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois. Bubba is believed to be the first fish to undergo chemotherapy. He was often nicknamed "The Super Grouper."

History

The 69.3 kilogram Bubba was donated to the aquarium in 1987 by an anonymous donor; at the time he was a female about ten inches long. Bubba switched gender to male (being a protogynous hermaphrodite) in the mid-1990s and eventually grew to 154 pounds while living in the aquarium's "Wild Reef" shark exhibit. In 2001, Bubba developed an unusual growth on his forehead, which was eventually diagnosed to be malignant; the aquarium called in veterinarians to remove the growth surgically and treat Bubba with chemotherapy that year, and again in 2003 when it regrew.

Shedd officials stated that Bubba was popular with cancer survivors, especially children, and was a favorite of visitors. The oncology department of Hope Children's Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, recognized Bubba with a tile in the ward.