For months, Kemmer Tonne, a baby name consultant in the suburbs of San Francisco, had been searching for the perfect name for her second son. Nothing on her carefully considered list felt quite right. Then, during her third trimester, a surname suddenly popped into her head: Wrigley.
She texted the name to her fiancé Stephen Crooks, a lifelong baseball fan, expecting little more than a reaction. Instead, he came running downstairs from his home office. He loved the baseball connection, loved the nickname Riggs, and, most of all, loved the name itself. For the first time during the pregnancy, Tonne tells TODAY.com, “a name felt right.”
The certainty did not last long online.
After welcoming Wrigley in May, Tonne, 31, posted a four-minute TikTok explaining how she and Crooks landed on the name. She expected the video would be seen mostly by her followers, many of whom regularly turn to her for baby-naming advice.
“I wasn’t expecting it to go viral,” she says. “People don’t watch videos that long!”
Turns out, they do. The video spread far beyond her audience.
Commenters questioned whether the name would age well. Some compared it to a baseball stadium or a pack of gum. Others were more blunt. “Can’t really picture a manager sitting in a board room saying, ‘Good morning everyone, my name is Wrigley,’” one person wrote. Another commented, “Is this satire?” while a third asked whether Tonne consulted on names for “human babies or canines.”
The response caught her off guard.
“I really honestly did not think it was that crazy,” Tonne says.
To her, Wrigley fit squarely within a broader naming trend that has gained popularity in recent years: surnames used as first names. Cooper, the name of her 2-year-old son, follows the same pattern. So do names like Parker, Carter, Brooks and Bennett, which have climbed baby-name charts in recent decades.
“I thought it just kind of fit with that style,” she says. “It’s a well-known surname, it has really cute nicknames and people are naming their kids Riggs.”
At first, Tonne read the comments. She has since stopped.
“Knowing that thousands of people hate it, that’s not a great feeling, obviously.”
The couple had considered more conventional options including Weston, which was their runner-up choice Other finalists included Maxwell, Baker and Huntley. They debated names for days after their son was born and even brought him home from the hospital without having made a final decision.
But Wrigley kept returning other the top of the list.
While the internet may never be convinced, the people whose opinions mattered most were.
“Stephen and I are obsessed with it,” Tonne says. “And that’s what matters most.”
