Could your initials affect your success in life? Your academic achievement? Even your batting average? Some scientists seem to think so. Two studies conducted by Leif Nelson at the University of California, San Diego and his colleague Joseph Simmons from Yale University appear to indicate success eludes people whose initials match negative performance labels.

In the first study, Nelson and Simmons looked at the correlation between the letter 'K" and batting averages of Major League Baseball players whose names began with a "K." What's the significance? As all you baseball nerds know, in baseball scoring, strikeouts are recorded using the letter "K" (And I'm glad you asked. You did, didn't you? The use of "K" for a strikeout was invented in the 1860's by Henry Chadwick, a newspaper journalist who is widely credited as the originator of the box score and the baseball scorecard. The letter "S" was used to denote "sacrifice" so Chadwick decided to use "K", because it was the last letter in "struck." Huh?)

Anyway, in this first study, after analyzing 93 years of players' performance, the researchers found that batters whose names began with 'K' struck out at a higher rate than the remaining batters.

In a second study, Nelson and Simmons looked for a correlation between academic performance and names beginning with "A," "B" or "C." The duo reviewed 15 years of grade point averages (GPAs) for MBA graduates from a large private university in the US.

While students whose names began with "C" or "D" earned lower grades than students with "A" or "B" names, the initial "A" or "B" names did not do better than students with grade-irrelevant initials like "H" or "T." So having "good" initials may not necessarily increase your chance of succeeding, but "bad" initials increase your chance of failure.

I'm not sure if I should be happy with my initials or not. But I will tell you this. The initials I was born with were "MF." I suppose the connotations of that may not be altogether positive, but then again perhaps it was me Prince was thinking of when he wrote "Sexy M.F.".