It's hard to give a really robust solution here without knowing what forms the data can take. First, do you always have Firstname Lastname, or do some players have middle names? Or suppose bell hooks or e.e. cummings starts to play baseball, you'll have to deal with case. But here's how you might do it. I assume you're getting the lines out as an array, and the second element is the player's name.

# split line into @data, or whatever
$data[1] =~ s/^([A-Z])\w*( \w+)$/$1.$2/g;
[download]

What that does is grab the first capital letter of $data[1] and remembers it in $1; then it matches a whole bunch of other letters (which are going to get thrown away), followed by a space and the last string of letters in the string (which it remembers as $2).

It then substitutes that whole thing for the first thing it remembered, followed by the period, then the second thing it remembered.

See perldoc perlre for more ways to have fun with regular expressions.

Note: this is only one way to do it =)

HTH