In the eyes of the right beholder, baseball trivia is an important pastime. Paradoxical but true ' baseball trivia is significant. In other sports, trivia is as forced as a pass into a crowd. Try asking someone how many points Michael Jordan scored or how many yards Johnny Unitas passed for. Only a lifelong resident of Nerdville would know or care. The history of those games isn't nearly as celebrated as baseball history is. Two of the ineffable charms of baseball are its history and statistics, making it a far more intriguing subject for trivia.
My introduction to the serious pursuit of knowledge to be gleaned from trivia occurred fourteen summers ago at Runyons. At this Front Page ' style restaurant on Second Avenue in New York City, a copy of Total Baseball was always within arm's reach of the comer table. Several of the habitues who liked to create trivia questions-Gene Orza, Terry Cashman, and Joe Healy, to name a few-made up a group that appeared on sports radio stations or the Madison Square Garden channel. I recall that sportscaster Dave Simms would sometimes moderate the contests. If you stumped this group ' a Sisyphean task in itself ' they'd quid pro quo you with a question of their own. The chance of finding a hole with your question, and then hitting their offering, was about the same chance as your softball team has of beating the New York Yankees. The probabilities were somewhere between slim and none, and Slim always seemed to be just leaving town.
Despite the infinitesimal odds, I did succeed against the Group on the radio one Opening Day. "Name two pitchers who won 20 games and had more wins than walks in those years," I commanded, knowing I'd thrown a high and tight one. No one knew. The two pitchers were Slim Sallee, a left-hander who won 21 with the 1919 Reds and walked just 20, and the Giants' great hurler, Christy Mathewson, who won 25 in 1913 and 25 in 1914 while walking just 21 and 23 in those years. I expected a return question about pitchers, since they liked to return fire with roughly similar fire. "What pitcher went 0 for 12 as a hitter one season?" Gene Orza asked. I remembered something I'd just read (on such chance occurrences our proudest trivia moments turn) about Koufax being an especially weak-hitting Pitcher, so I blurted out, "Sandy Koufax." I was right (Koufax also went 0-26 two years later). The prize ' a boom box, which I had to pick up at the radio station but never did ' was secondary. I just enjoyed the small triumph of slipping a question by these guys, who really knew and loved the game, especially its numerical treasures.
If no answer to a question seemed imminent, they'd move the question along with hints. If the question was "Name the players with ten or more letters in their last names who hit 40 homers in season,"' you might get three in short order but get stalled on Rico Petrocelli. After thirty seconds of silence, a merciful hint followed: "American League infielder, 1960s." If you couldn't get the answer after that generous offering, you were out of luck.
They drew me into trivia and it always seemed like an entertaining way to skip across baseball history and statistics. Here's hoping it does the same for you.
The Major League Baseball Book of Fabulous Facts and Awesome Trivia. Copyright © by Ken Shouler. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.