Sporcle Saturday: Have a day, Luis Robert

(Photo by Nick Wosika/Icon Sportswire)

Good morning!

As Jim wrote about in the Opening Day game recap on Tuesday, Luis Robert was the difference in the Sox win, what with his defensive and offensive heroics.

While it will hopefully not be Robert’s first such game, it was the team’s first game in over four years that saw a Sox batter hit a home run and record multiple stolen bases in the course of nine innings (and just the seventh this century). In franchise history there have only been 29 such occurrences and only two Sox players to accomplish it twice.

Today’s Sporcle asks you to name those 29 instances: how many can you get? Good luck!

Quiz Parameters

  • I’ve allotted 10 minutes for completion attempts.
  • For hints I’ve provided the date in which the game occurred, and the position the player was at defensively on that day.

Useless information to amaze, annoy, confuse, and/or confound your friends and family:

  • I thought the first White Sox player to accomplish this may have also been the first player ever in the American League to do so, but alas; Nap Lajoie has him beat by four days: May 2, 1901.
  • Only one player in baseball history (since 1901) has hit two home runs and stolen more than two bases (four!), and he’s an entry on this list: June 28, 1941.
  • The player in baseball history to accomplish this feat the most times in their career? The answer is unsurprising, and my first guess as well as it is likely yours: Rickey Henderson, with 21 such games (three coming over a torrid eight-day stretch in May of 1986). Barry Bonds is a distant second, at 11 games.
  • The White Sox are 23-6 when one of their players accomplishes this feat.
  • Overall, MLB teams are 654-201-1 when a player(s) does this in a game.
  • Five teams have had two players do this in the same game: the Philadelphia Athletics on 7/25/1930 (Al Simmons and Bing Miller, a 14-1 win over Cleveland); Cleveland in game 1 of a doubleheader on 6/27/1965 (Chuck Hinton and Leon Wagner, a 10-7 win over the Kansas City Athletics); Oakland on 7/26/1982 (Rickey Henderson and Dwayne Murphy, an 11-8 win over the California Angels); Cincinnati on 4/14/1987 (Kal Daniels and Eric Davis, a 6-3 win over Atlanta); and, finally, the Colorado Rockies on 6/27/1994 (Dante Bichette and Eric Young, Sr., a 12-7 win over the San Diego Padres).

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All data from stathead.com

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asinwreck

Good one, Ted. I am especially happy to have a quiz with the 1979 right fielders included.

26/29, and I am disappointed in myself that I did not guess the 1945 left fielder. Got everyone who was more recent than him.

roke1960

17/29. I struggled with this one. Great quiz, Ted!

Joliet Orange Sox

I got a clear majority and I’m pleasantly surprised. I did get both 1979 right fielders!

I looked up the 1945 right fielder. His nickname was “Ugly” and he was never really a regular in his career other than in 1945 when he played regularly for the Sox at the end of WWII at the age of 35. He had almost half of his career plate appearances (542 out of 1110) in that one year and put up an OPS+ of 127 and produced 2.7 bWAR. It was the only year of his career with an OPS+ above 100 and his career bWAR (including the 2.7 in 1945) was 2.3 so it was almost literally a career year for him. He was out of baseball the next year as other players returned from the war.

This one was a lot of fun. I only got 15. My worst misses were the 2003 CF/RF (I don’t think of him as a CF, one of the ’79 RF’s who I was just talking about yesterday in a discussion of pinch hitters from the ’80’s, and my favorite name in White Sox history from ’45.

stevev

Only 14/29, but definitely fun. You couldn’t do it by just guessing famous names – like a couple of the rebuild contributors. Also odd that there were that many from the 1901 ‘dead ball’ era.

joewho112

Surprised not to see Raines or Durham