TRIVIA 2020

I was doing one of those Sporacles (still around)...Only franchise without a 200-hit guy?

Must be one of the more recent expansion teams ... Diamondbacks?

Yes, but not them--Luis Gonzalez had ~210 hits one year.

That one was so popular, let me try another. It's a long answer...Posnanski has a piece today that lists the HR leader for each letter in the alphabet. As an example, the easy first one: A = Aaron.

If you try it, here's a link to the piece where you can check your answers:

https://joeposnanski.substack.com/p/all-time-homer-leaders-by-letter?r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

i am ready to humiliate myself, going with my gut, no googling, 5 minutes or less

B is for bonds
Canseco
Dimaggio?
E
F
Gehrig
Hodges
I
Jackson
Killebrew
L
Mays
N
Ortiz
Pujols
Q
Rodriguez
Sosa
Thome
U
V
W
X
Yount
Zobrist

ugh, so many obvious names now that i look at the list, haha.

zero N position players in the hall of fame!

There's a good joke in Posnanski's piece having to do with your 'R' guess.

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lol at me getting R wrong, too. 5-year-old me is astonished that i was wrong on this

reading through the piece now

Having said that, your guesses are better than mine would have been.

full circle, speaking of N's not in the hall of fame, I think graig nettles might be a good example of a guy who played with too many different teams

i guess, looking at his (fangraphs) stats more closely, a lot of value was derived from his superior defense at 3B, while the offense was merely consistently above average. HOF voters seem to discount that pretty commonly

Nettles did play for a lot of teams, more than I would have thought (6). Not sure if that'd be a factor with him, though; his identification with the Yankees is pretty strong (and his years there far outnumber anywhere else).

When Tracer posted something on another thread suggesting he'd always identify McGwire with the A's, I was surprised when I checked and saw that, indeed, such a high percentage of his games were played in Oakland (1329/1874). Shows how much he did, and how much press he got, during his St. Louis tenure.

re: that list my only humiliation is that I couldn't think of anyone for W

I'm just glad you guessed the right Willie M. for M.

(And I don't mean McCovey...)

there are many good M options, it turns out

mccovey, mcgwire, mantle...I thought about Murray and Mathews too!

musial too, as the link points out

i think harmon killebrew was kind of my grade school baseball flex. no one i knew had any clue who he was. i'd be like, "yeah, 573 home runs. that's FIFTH all time", and they would just kick me in the balls so hard

My favourite thing in the whole piece, right up there with Prince and Cecil tied in HR and Griffey/Musial's birthplace:

H: Ryan Howard, 382; Frank Howard, 382

This is definitely my favorite letter. It thrills me that two gigantic men named Howard, playing in different times and different places, climbed and climbed and, in the end, met at the top of Mount H.

“D” surprised me!

My reflexive guess was DiMaggio too, even though I knew he was under 400.

For what it's worth, the previous answer was the Rays: Aubrey Huff's 198 hits is the most in franchise history. Here's the Sporacle:

https://www.sporcle.com/games/smyth/mlb_hit_leaders_by_team

I missed five or six.

Oops, wrong Sporacle:

https://www.sporcle.com/games/Ben/ss_team_hits_leaders

Jesus the barves have a record on the books from 1894!!!

Haven't had a chance to try/read, but Joe. P's most-pitcher-wins by letter:

https://joeposnanski.substack.com/p/most-wins-by-letter?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

The three 300-game winners I guessed were all wrong.

I was a surprise!

the letter "I"

i was a surprise, it's a me, mario!

I love the gap between #1 and #2 for the Ys.

trying to think of who would be #2 there...chris young? it would help if i could think of a single non-Young Y pitcher.

YES

That's amazing...I probably would have guessed Yastrzemski.

i got 12 of those. very proud of getting "I"!

one to ponder:

what was the last team that had more triples than home runs in a full season?

had to be pre-deadball...
maybe the Cobb/Crawford/Heilmann(? not sure if all three played together) Tigers?

post-deadball! i was kinda shocked

it's post-expansion, even

like post-most-recent-expansion?! i might have guessed the 80's at some point. i know there was one year where Rollins and Reyes both had a shitload of 3b, but i don't see either of those teams having fewer HRs. just trying to think of modern teams that were known for speed and not-much power... Royals from about7 years ago comes to mind...

this is what i'm doing now instead of sleeping

ok, post...1977 expansion

KM's question, so I'm going to guess the '85 Cardinals.

ah 80's! that's a good guess. put it up on the board!

Close, but not quite: 59 triples, 87 home runs.

They had more wins (101) than HR, that might be unusual.

sorry for trivia overload, but i just learned the SFG almost moved to toronto! while reading up on h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Major_League_Baseball_expansion :

On January 9, 1976, the National Exhibition Company, owners of the San Francisco Giants, established an agreement in principle to sell the franchise to a consortium owned by Labatt Brewing Company, Vulcan Assets, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce for C$13,250,000.[11] The Giants had failed to repay a US$500,000 loan from Major League Baseball, and had experienced declining revenues since the relocation of the Kansas City Athletics to Oakland in 1968.[11] Of the sale price, US$5,250,000 was to be placed in escrow to "meet certain possible obligations with respect to the transaction", especially the lease of Candlestick Park, which would expire in 1994.[11]

The new owners of the Giants, led by Don McDougall, would move the team to Toronto pending approval from the other eleven National League teams, which would be sought on January 14 at the Winter Meetings of General Managers in Phoenix. The team would be known as the Toronto Giants[11] and would begin play during the 1976 Major League Baseball season. The deal was scuttled by a Superior Court of California, which issued an injunction blocking the sale on February 11, 1976; the injunction was requested by the city of San Francisco on January 10.[13] The National Exhibition Company eventually accepted a purchase proposal from Bob Lurie in a deal brokered by George Moscone, the Mayor of San Francisco.[13]

The American League provided an opportunity for a Toronto franchise, and two groups bid for the rights to franchise ownership in the city.[10] Ultimately, an ownership group named Metro Baseball Ltd. consisting of Labatt Brewing Company, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Imperial Trust won the bid for a franchise fee of C$7,000,000.[7][14][15][12]

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clemenza, your instincts are good regarding the cardinals, as i learned about this Triples > HR season while watching this 1991 game tonight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uie2bTBErw8

but no, it's not the cardinals. the 1991 cardinals team did come close to achieving the feat, however, with 53 Triples and 68 Home Runs

i'm going to be very sad when i run out of random old baseball games on youtube to watch

answer to the triples > HR question:

1979 astros

I was sure it was the '85 or '87 Cards, and if not them, one of those late 70's or early 80's Royals teams? I wasn't close to thinking of the right answer, but having seen it then of course it makes perfect sense.

shows how much has changed, i guess. 85/87 cards were too early for me to have but the fuzziest memories of, but i remember the (also extremely weak) '91 cardinals so well, watching every single game i could. now, it's kind of unfathomable for a team to have more triples than HRs.

just checking for 2021, the highest ratio of triples to homeruns was...

overall for baseball (2021), there were 671 triples and 5,944 HRs, for a 0.113 ratio.

the pirates came in highest (or worse), with 35 triples vs 124 HRs (.282). ARI was next highest, with 31/144/.215.
on the other side, the blue jays had only 13 triples vs 262 HRs, putting them at 0.050.