Not-So-Basic Nightmare Baseball [9] Quiz

Answer: Ted Williams

Regarded as one of the best hitters in the game's history, Ted Williams was a career Red Sox player, being a part of Boston's team for nearly twenty years. His 0.344 batting average is colossal and his on-base percentage of 0.482 became a record that would remain unbroken into the twenty-first century.

He retired from playing the the sport in 1960, returning briefly to manage in the early 1970s, and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. He would pass away in 2002.

Answer: Rogers Hornsby

Hornsby hit forty-two home runs in 1922 and it was the first year that anyone had hit over twenty-five in the National League. Then a player for the St. Louis Cardinals, his batting average of 0.424 for the season would become regarded unbeatable. Hornsby would eventually become a World Series Champion with them in 1926 (as their manager).

He would proceed to jump around teams for several years before coming home to roost with St. Louis again, closing out his career as a player in 1937 and his career as a manager in 1953.

He passed away in 1963.

Answer: Babe Ruth

Then in his fourth season as one of the Boston Red Sox, Babe Ruth would manage a total of eleven home runs-- the same score as Philadelphia Athletics player Tilly Walker-- to cap off the American League. In the same year, Ruth would win his third World Series of seven, completing the rest of them while a member of the New York Yankees. Walker, meanwhile, would remain in the sport until the end of the 1923 season with one World Series win under his belt, shared with Ruth from when they were both Red Sox players in 1916.

Answer: Harmon Killebrew

A near-career-long Washington Senators/Minnesota Twins player (who spent one year, at the end of his career, as a Kansas City Royal), Killebrew ended his career with five hundred seventy-three home runs and played in the All-Star Game thirteen times.

Nevertheless, all of the incorrect options had noteworthy careers. Mel Ott was the first MLB player to hit five hundred homer runs; Eddie Murray nearly hit a thousand RBI in the 1980s (he made it to nine hundred ninety-six); McGwire had four consecutive fifty-home-run seasons. None hit the All-Star Game home run despite being noteworthy hitters and All-Stars.

Answer: Sandy Koufax

A career Dodger, playing with the team for eleven seasons while it transitioned from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, Koufax won all three Cy Young Awards with them, doing so in 1963, 1965, and 1966. Additionally, Koufax would aid the team in winning four World Series championships, two of which fell on those years (1963 and 1965).

At the time, Koufax would become the first multiple winner of the award when he won the one in 1965. He would be beaten out of the record by Steve Carlton, who got his fourth in 1982; his record would be doubled by Roger Clemens who received his sixth in 2001 (and his seventh in 2004).

Answer: New York Mets

If this one was a shot in the dark, it might help to know that all of the incorrect teams were American League teams-- only the Mets were part of the National League.

Tom Seaver won his second of three Cy Young Awards in 1973 and his third (and final) would be in 1975. Playing in the MLB for twenty seasons, Seaver seemed to see most of his success with the Mets, winning not only his three Cy Young Awards with them, but a World Series in 1969. He would join the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991 by a near unanimous vote. He would pass away in 2020 due to complications brought on by COVID-19.

Answer: Minnie Miņoso

Considered one of the strongest players for the Chicago White Sox (though he played for many teams during his career), Miņoso was 53 when hit on September 12, 1976. It would be his penultimate season of play; he returned briefly in 1980 (at the age of 57), appearing on teams in five different decades of the sport. Miņoso would be elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but not until 2022.

Nick Altrock was 52 when he got a hit in 1929. He shares the five-decades feat with Miņoso.

Answer: Frank Frisch

Though simply considered the MLB MVP Award, the Baseball Writers' Association didn't really invent it-- they adopted it to merge awards from the American League and National League which had been handed out for a decade by that point. This said, 1931 was the first instance in which the BWAA held the reins and they gave the prize to Frank Frisch on the National League side (and Lefty Grove on the American League). Frisch was, then, a teammate for the St. Louis Cardinals for whom he would play for eleven seasons, winning two of his four World Series Championships with them.

Answer: Ken Williams

Ken Williams, who played the majority of his fifteen seasons with the St. Louis Browns, won the crown in 1922 by hitting thirty-nine home runs. In the same year, he managed to hit more than thirty homers and steal thirty bases, a record he was the first person to achieve. No one else would join the 30-30 Club for thirty-four years when Willie Mays achieved the feat (and would do so again the year after).

Bob Meusel hit thirty-three home runs in 1925. Despite both of these men, Babe Ruth still won an amazing twelve crowns in fourteen years.

Answer: The MLB was on strike

The teams played only 144 games in the 1994-1995 season due to a massive MLB strike, then the longest in sports history, lasting more than seven months as the negotiations continued from August to April of the following year. It led to the cancellation of nearly 950 games. With the Dodgers' home record, they squeaked by the Colorado Rockies by one game to win the division. Neither would make it to the World Series; both would be knocked out at the division level and the Atlanta Braves would take the Championship.