Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Jim Bouton's groundbreaking bestseller, 'Ball Four', is about his experiences with which expansion team?
2. Bouton writes about his efforts to get back to the Majors using what pitch?
3. Who described some of the bizarre plays during the Mets' first season in his book entitled 'Can't Anybody Here Play This Game'?
4. Many of the most entertaining books are written by ex-catchers. Which former catcher wrote about the humorous side of baseball in his bestseller 'Baseball Is a Funny Game'?
5. Whose biography is entitled, 'The Catcher Was a Spy?'
6. Which catcher-turned-broadcaster wrote 'The Catcher in the Wry'?
7. Which catcher-turned-broadcaster wrote 'Baseball for Brain Surgeons'?
8. Which writer spent the last year of Ty Cobb's life with him, and later wrote a 420-page biography of Cobb?
9. Which colorful former umpire wrote about his umpiring experiences in the entertaining book, 'The Umpire Strikes Back'?
10. Who wrote 'It is said that baseball is 'only a game'. Yes, and the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.'?
11. Who wrote a magazine article entitled '99 reasons why baseball is better than football'?
12. The well-known poem 'Casey at the Bat', written by Ernest Thayer, was first published in which newpaper?
13. Who wrote the almost-as-well-known poem 'Tinker to Evers to Chance'?
14. Managers have written some good baseball books. Which former manager wrote 'Nice Guys Finish Last', chronicling his days as a player and manager over a period of six different decades?
15. Which erudite baseball observor wrote this nugget in his bestselling book: 'Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community'?
16. In what work does the main character bare his soul to his therapist, at one point telling him: 'For in center field, if you can get to it, it *is* yours. Oh, how unlike my home it is to be in centerfield, where noone will appropriate unto himself anything that I say is mine.'
17. Who, while President of Yale, wrote this poetic masterpiece: 'It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the Spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the Fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.'?
18. Whose beautiful eulogy at Mickey Mantle's funeral, entitled 'The Ninth Inning', included the observation that 'We knew there was something poignant about Mickey Mantle before we knew what poignant meant'?
19. Speaking of poignancy, Roger Kahn's bestseller 'Boys of Summer' tells the stories of what happened to the players on the Brooklyn Dodger teams of the early 1950's after retirement. Which old Dodger moved back to Anderson, Indiana after his fourth child was born mongoloid?
20. Which Dodger became an agnostic after his son lost a leg in Vietnam?
21. Which 'boy of summer' sued the Dodgers because they released him while he was hurt, without paying him for the rest of the year as required by the standard player contract?
22. Which Dodger became a broadaster, teaming with Dizzy Dean on NBC's Game of the Week?
23. Which Dodger became a bartender in Newport, Pennsylvania?
24. Which Dodger became the manager of the Mets?
25. Which Dodger was crippled in a car accident?
Source: Author
chessart
This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor
gtho4 before going online.
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