B.J. Upton announced Sunday that he now wants to go by his birth name, Melvin Upton Jr., and considering his struggles for the Braves in recent years lots of people assumed he was doing it as a way to clean the slate/turn the page/whatever cliche you want to use.
Not so, says Upton, telling Mark Bowman of MLB.com:
This has nothing to do with starting a new chapter. I just wanted to. My father thought enough to give me his name, so why not? It was the name that was given to me as a kid. So I felt I wanted to go by my real name. Most of my friends call me Mel or Melvin. Nobody really calls me B.J., except at the stadium.
“B.J.” stood for Bossman Junior, because Upton’s father was known as Bossman.
