Meet Vinnie Pasquantino, the sleeper slugger whose name you won’t forget

I had to ask. You know, the name.

Vinnie Pasquantino is simultaneously an absolutely perfect old-timey baseball name as well as the kind of extraordinarily Italian name a soap opera might give to the new, suave doctor from Brooklyn. I first read the name a little over two and half years ago, and it immediately popped out to me.

So, there’s got to be a story, right? Right?

“Sorry there isn’t more to it,” Pasquantino told me in an email. “My mother and father couldn’t come up with a name for me—my dad wanted something Italian, my mom wanted ‘Derek Jeter Pasquantino’ (half kidding). One day, they were at Food Lion and my father bought a baby name book. He was reading names off to my mother from…