left join returning more than expected

Let's assume you have the following tables:

tbl1:
|Name |
-------
|Name1|
|Name2|

tbl2:
|Name |Value |
--------------
|Name1|Value1|
|Name1|Value2|
|Name3|Value1|

For your LEFT JOIN you'll get:

|tbl1.Name|tbl2.Name|Value |
----------------------------
|Name1    | Name1   |Value1|
|Name1    | Name1   |Value2|
|Name2    | NULL    | NULL |

So, LEFT JOIN means that all records from LEFT (first) table will be returned regardless of their presence in right table.

For your question you need to specify some specific fields instead of using "*" and add GROUP BY tbl1.Name - so your query will look like

select tbl1.Name, SOME_AGGREGATE_FUNCTION(tbl2.specific_field), ...
from table1
left join table2 on table1.name = table2.name
GROUP BY tbl1.Name

LEFT JOIN can return multiple copies of the data from table1, if the foreign key for a row in table 1 is referenced by multiple rows in table2.

If you want it to only return 16 rows, one for each table 1 row, and with a random data set for table 2, you can use just a plain GROUP BY:

select *
from table1
left join table2 on table1.name = table2.name
group by table1.name

GROUP BY aggregates rows based on a field, so this will collapse all the table1 duplicates into one row. Generally, you specify aggregate functions to explain how the rows should collapse (for example, for a number row, you could collapse it using SUM() so the one row would be the total). If you just want one random row though, don't specify any aggregate functions. MySQL will by default just choose one row (note that this is specific to MySQL, most databases will require you to specify aggregates when you group). The way it chooses it is not technically "random", but it is not necessarily predictable to you. I guess by "random" you really just mean "any row will do".