The Ol' Ballfield

What did people know before there were internet quizzes?

This is a really good, succinct quiz from ESPN.com on the history of baseball. Give it a shot, see how you do.

Baseball History Quiz

I got a 36 out of 50. Most of the questions are stuff that someone who knows a lot about baseball would know; I'd say three baseball-heads combined could get a 50/50 handily. But some questions are a little ridiculous: Where Vin Scully went to college? Was college even invented when Vin Scully was 18? Here's a couple more questions I couldn't answer:

-What newspaper first dubbed baseball the "national pastime" on December 5, 1856?

-What Hall-of-Famer caught a record four no-hitters in his career?

-Who holds the record for most home runs by a pitcher?

-Who is the only player to hit 50 home runs and strike out fewer than 50 times in a season?

-Who is the only player to win the Rookie of the Year, MVP and Cy Young awards?

To name just a few.

The REALLY cool thing about this quiz is that they gave the same thing to a bunch of players and "experts", and let you see how you compared. I think we really need more opportunities to prove just how not-that-much-smarter than the average fan these "experts" really are. I'm serious about that.

Dumbest players? Brad Ausmus, Mike Lowell and Dave Roberts. Smartest? (And the only one that scored better than me?) Kevin Mench. I guess that enlarged head isn't just for show.

Smartest "expert"? Gary Gillette. Rob Neyer let me down, missing by two. I managed to tie Jerry Crasnick, beat Eric Karabell, and destroy Steve Phillips, by far the dumbest expert. Seriously, Steve Phillips is dumber than a cat. Everything he says or does is awful. How anyone let him ever run a baseball team is a mystery, and I don't mean that in the colloquial "it's a mystery to me" sense, I mean someone should really hire a fucking detective to find out how the hell that happened.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah. Take the quiz, motherfuckers. Carnival owns you.

posted by Carnival @ 11/29/2006