Spoiler alert: The following story features spoilers of the series finale of HBO’s “Succession.”
Her favorite day of the year was the one afternoon on the Chicago Cubs schedule that allowed her to bring her American Girl doll to the cathedral on Addison Street. Waiting for her was a new Cubs outfit for her special companion. As a kid, Sophie Kihm packed along her doll and went to Wrigley Field with her grandfather, who had season tickets that would make any baseball fan drip with envy: fifth row, right behind home plate.
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“The perfect view,” she said.
Baseball never left her system. So when Kihm took it upon herself last week to add to the swelling hype around Sunday’s series finale of the HBO hit “Succession,” it’s only fitting that baseball, once again, found its way back into the fold.
Kihm, the editor-in-chief of Nameberry.com, the world’s largest baby name website, had been pondering what hypothetical name TV characters Siobhan “Shiv” Roy and her husband, Tom Wambsgans, would bestow upon their expectant child. The show, Kihm said, has been intentional in the naming of some of its characters. After the nerve-racking series finale, it’s hard to ignore the double entendre of Shiv. The late patriarch of the Waystar Royco dynasty, Logan Roy, carried the Scottish surname that has roots in Latin meaning king.
The name that Kihm fixated on, though, during all this fun, was that of Shiv’s estranged husband and resident punching bag, Wambsgans.
“I was just curious about the name Wambsgans,” she said. “I’d never heard of this name before. Let me look into this.”
@nameberry.comDo the names on Succession reveal the show’s ending? #succession #hbomax #tomwambsgans #billwambsganss #shivroy #successionhbo #successiontok #successionfinale #babynames #nameberry
♬ Epic Inspiration – DM Production
What followed was a one minute, 35 second TikTok video that immediately became part of the pop culture zeitgeist. Like all viral pieces of content, Kihm’s video blazed across social media platforms as followers of the show couldn’t contain their nerves ahead of the finale. Last Wednesday, it took Kihm about an hour to type out the script, record and post her findings pertaining to the finale. The internet, it turns out, is exceptionally short on real life Wambsgans.
She uncovered, though, a Wambsganss spelled with an extra “s,” a famous Wambsganss, a World Series-winning Wambsganss. Baseball was back, bringing forth a collision of worlds: the anticipation of her favorite TV show ending and the desire to find out how writers chose Wambsgans as the last name of its eventual and unexpected champion, one half of the “Disgusting Brothers.”
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From 1914 to 1926, Cleveland Indians second baseman Bill Wambsganss was an average player with a below-average batting average. His surname was deemed too tricky at the time for sports writers and editors, so he was often referred to as “Wamby” in headlines and stories. In the 1,491 major-league games where he graced the box score, Wambsganss finished as a .259 hitter with just seven home runs. In his 13 years, he had a .958 fielding percentage, except in the World Series, where he went from average to extraordinary in the blink of an eye. Something Tom knows something about.
In Game 5 of the 1920 World Series, Wambsganss did something still yet to be accomplished by another major leaguer to date — he pulled off an unassisted triple play.
We understand there may have been a second Wambsgans triple play executed last night… pic.twitter.com/xdW9eFF4Tw
— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) May 29, 2023
As Kihm went through Wambsganss’ Wikipedia page and got to that point, the alarm bells went off. Was this an easter egg of all easter eggs written by the show’s writers to tease that it would be Tom Wambsgans, famed son of St. Paul, Minn., who would emerge in place of the late Logan Roy? Not his wife? Not his delusional pair of brothers-in-law?
Kihm’s video began spreading Friday as people on various platforms screen-grabbed it and posted it on Twitter and Instagram. Kihm said in just a few days’ time, a couple of tweets of her video repurposed on Twitter had combined impressions of more than 5 million. Turns out, pop culture devotees love a fun conspiracy theory, no matter big or small.
“I like that everyone is talking about names. I think that’s really cool,” she said. “I wonder if this will maybe influence how future shows are writing names or choosing names for their characters.”
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Kihm also pointed out that while her video has garnered attention from a specific corner of the internet, she undoubtedly wasn’t the first fan of the show to come up with this theory. Plus, Tom being ushered away in a black SUV as the CEO of a fictional media empire wasn’t the first time he managed to pull off a triple play. At the end of Season 3, Tom betrayed Shiv, and by proxy her brothers Kendall and Roman, by informing Logan of his children’s attempted coup d’état. Tom could’ve been a hell of a second baseman, right?
The theory, Kihm said, was never something she believed wholeheartedly. More than anything it was something worth entertaining in the moment. A what if of all what ifs. On Monday night, Slate confirmed with “Succession” executive producer Frank Rich that Tom’s last name had nothing to do with Bill Wambsganss and his unassisted triple play. Rich said a staffer had a relative whose last name was Wambsgans.
“If memory serves,” Rich told Slate, “we were looking for something off-key that would be awkward to say/pronounce, befitting a character who arrives as an outsider in the Roys’ world.”
And if we’re paying true homage to Bill Wambsganss, an unassisted triple play is something Tom never managed to do on his own. Shiv or Cousin Greg or Logan were essential to Tom’s once unfathomable rise through the cutthroat world of the Roy empire.
Kihm said she found it hilarious that her video had traction enough to send reporters across the world scrambling down rabbit holes in search of confirmation.
“I was like, ‘Why are they commenting on this?!’” she said. “So many of the replies to the tweet (of the Slate story) so far are, ‘Why are you ruining my fun?’ People are really, pun intended, going to bat for me. It just shows that people want to buy into stuff like this.”
(Photo of Matthew Macfadyen (2nd L) and “Succession” cast: Kevin Winter / Getty Images)
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