Sporcle Saturday: Walk off homers
Good morning!
Tim Anderson walked off the Yankees in memorable fashion Thursday night, giving the Sox a 9-8 victory in front of a national audience. Per Baseball Reference’s Stathead database, that’s the fourteenth game in franchise history where the White Sox have hit a walk off home run against the Yankees.
While it may have been the fourteenth such occasion against the Yankees, it is the 151st time overall the White Sox have hit a walk off home run against an opponent. Today’s Sporcle, as the headline suggests, is all about those walk off home runs: you’re tasked with naming the players responsible for the dingers. How many can you get? Good luck!
Quiz Parameters
- I’ve allotted the full 20 minutes for completion attempts.
- For hints, I’ve provided the date of the game, the opponent, and the position the player played during the game in question.
Useless information to amaze, annoy, confuse, and/or confound your friends and family:
- The franchise leader with the most walk off home runs has 8 such events.
- The White Sox have never walked off an opposing pitcher more than twice.
- A White Sox second baseman hasn’t walked it off for the team since July 3, 1978. Maybe Cesar Hernandez can change that.
(Photo credit: Jeffrey Becker-USA TODAY Sports)
All data from stathead.com
116/151. Most of the misses were before 1960, though there were several in my lifetime that I just drew a blank on. Another great quiz, Ted!
Thanks! Fun one to put together.
Good quiz. I only got 92. Does that make me a horrible person?
115/151 before I ran out of time. Great quiz, and I agree that some of the names even from my lifetime were tricky.
I like to look up the players I’ve never heard of that show up in these quizzes. I was interested to see that the 1922 catcher had a very short career and only hit 2 career home runs.
The more interesting career was the 1957 pitcher who was a good hitter for a pitcher with a career ops+ of 106 with 5 career homers. He played in the majors in 1940, 1949, 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1958 (the bold years are with the Sox). He spent a lot of years between mlb stints. He died in 1960 at the age of 40.
I found it interesting that the 1957 pitcher’s career overlapped with a catcher of the exact same name. The pitcher and catcher were both on the 1949 Reds and based on game logs I believe the battery of the pitcher and catcher with same name happened in three games.
The 1957 pitcher has a SABR biography:
SABR bio
Wow. A fascinating life and career. A record-holder (and I’m going to guess he’ll be a record-holder forever) who was also a POW at the end of World War II. Thank you for posting the bio.