Good morning!
A few weeks ago Chris Kamka tweeted out this factoid about Jose Abreu:
I missed that tweet, but Sporcle stalwart KenWo4LiFe did not, and requested that I put together a Sporcle with those 61 names. It’s a terrific idea, and makes for a great offseason quiz. So thanks to Ken for the idea! If you have any ideas you’d like see come to fruition feel free to let me know in the comments section. I’ll try to make them happen.
As posited in the tweet above, what might have been, had Pito come to MLB earlier in his career? It’s a great question and the likely answer is that he might be well on the way to the Hall of Fame, as suggested by Kevin Goldstein over at FanGraphs.
At any rate, today’s Sporcle will test you on those 61 names across Major League baseball who have logged five or more seasons of 30+ home runs and 100+ RBI. The list spans from 1914 to present: how many can you fill in? Good luck!
Quiz Parameters
- I’ve allotted the full 20 minutes for completion attempts.
- For hints, I’ve provided the number of seasons a player accomplished this feat, the full length of their career, and the team(s) for which they played. One important caveat regarding teams: if a player left a team, then returned to them later in their career, that is not denoted because it made that hint column too wide. Even so, you may consider playing this one on the website rather than the embedded quiz below.
Useless information to amaze, annoy, confuse, and/or confound your friends and family:
- Thirteen players on this list donned a White Sox uniform at some point over the course of their careers.
- There is one father-son duo on this list.
- In total 361 major leaguers have had at least one 30 HR/100 RBI season in their careers.
All data from stathead.com
61/61. Ran the table on my personal quiz! Thanks Ted
Nice!!
55/61, and most of my misses were from the first decade of this century.
Given the headline, I was confused the criteria were not adjusted to include Iván Calderon.
Iván Calderon has a higher career bWAR than at least one of the answers.
That guy was one of my misses. I suppose he was less great than another of the guys who showed up on this list, the immortal
The guy who was traded for Jason Bere at least has a higher career bWAR than Iván Calderon.The guy I mentioned had one of his seasons be 31 HR, 104 rbi but took 700 plate appearances to do it. He made huge number of outs on the way to what looks like a productive year if you look only at the traditional counting stats and only produced 1.0 bWAR.
(I think people are sometimes too quick to dismiss traditional counting stats because those stats do require a certain level of performance being maintained over a full season and fewer guys can do that than one might think just looking at OPS+ or such for part-time players.)
I was momentarily shocked in looking up the guy I mentioned as a not-great player that one of BR’s most similar players for him was Frank Thomas. After a second’s thought, I realized it was the other Frank Thomas and it made much more sense.
A hundred runs batted in is a big accomplishment, period.
Sometimes more so for the guy(s) hitting ahead of him.
The last season that guy had 30/100, he had an OPS+ of 100.
A rather disappointing 52/61, but at least I got everyone who played while I was alive except 9 (1993-2009) and 5 (1976-1993).
59/61. I actually beat asinwreck; this is a career highlight! Should have been perfect. I obviously should have had
61/61 with 14 minutes left. This one was right in my wheelhouse.
A lot of those guys played for the Sox at one point, but I wonder how many of those 30/100 seasons were done with the Sox.