Billy Butler: Here Comes Country Breakfast
One of my favorite pastimes is taking a stroll down Baseball Reference via putting in random names or words and seeing what the search reveals. Specifically, I’m usually on the lookout for weird or interesting nicknames that I’ve never come across before or perhaps forgotten about as the years went by. I’m not the only one who uses this particular procrastination tool, believe it or not. OTBB already has a post on the top 10 BRef nicknames.
For me, there are days when I come across nothing all that interesting, then there are days that are truly special. Of course, there are also the days where I realize I can’t actually think Rick Porcello being nicknamed Ricky Raindrops is cool because the nickname was coined by a Barstool loser. These searches are like an emotional rollercoaster, let me tell you.
The other day the rollercoaster took me down a spiral I never knew about. The name Country Breakfast is everything one could ever want in a nickname, especially when that nickname is attached to Billy Butler.
For the uninitiated, Butler spent 10 years in the big leagues. Most of those were with the Kansas City Royals and just about all of them were productive. He spent his career as a designated hitter, for the most part. His numbers were never spectacular, but they were good burly DH numbers for a guy who looked like, “yeah, if there’s ever been a DH poster child, it’s that guy.”
Only now, I know that Billy Butler was called Country Breakfast and that makes an already productive baseball career even better. The image I have in my head is of the stocky Butler motoring around the bases just like a good country boy would. Then he heads to the local Cracker Barrel and pounds back a few hearty sausages, bacon, and ham combos. It’s not a slight against the guy either, I’m a big proponent of some Cracker Barrel myself. Only, I eat my assorted meats and pass out for a few hours. Butler eats his and keeps socking the baseball.
Unlike with most iconic nicknames, we know how Country Breakfast came to be. A former Missouri sports editor tweeted out the nickname one night in the early 2010s and it stuck. People everywhere started calling Butler Country Breakfast (that I remained oblivious to the nickname until recently is a major knock against my credibility).
In all my searching I couldn’t find anything with Butler’s actual thoughts on the nickname. However, he did make reference to the nickname himself in a few different television commercials so he had to have enjoyed the name somewhat.
My search into the Country Breakfast nickname did reveal that as recently as 2018 Billy Butler was still taking part in a recreational softball league. Apparently, he was dominating the league, and really if you’re not envisioning Butler on a softball diamond and thinking, “yeah, that tracks” you’re lying. Regardless, I’m going to go to sleep tonight content knowing that somewhere, somehow Country Breakfast is still mashing dingers and enjoying his sausages, ham, and bacon.
