(From April 6, 2010)

It’s a long way to October, baseball people like to say. What happened on Opening Day this week will seem like a long time ago come autumn.

But it will still matter. Such is life: You win some, you lose some and some get rained out, but you dress out for all of them. And all of them count.

To give you something to ponder either today or between games of a lazy summer doubleheader, here are some baseball questions and observations. (The answers are at the bottom. Don’t peak. That’s like stealing signals illegally. Bad form.)

A couple of the questions are taken from George Will’s annual Baseball Quiz in Newsweek, a column I was alerted to by Big C, a Fair Park All-State first sacker in the 1950s and former Shreveport Sports bat boy. Big C likes to remind me that baseball is a very humbling game, and that life is much the same way. It pays in both to keep your eye on the ball, lest you get caught leaning. Just when you get cocky, the ball has a funny way of finding you…

1. How did a team hit into a triple play without any fielder touching the ball?
2. Who’s on first?
3. Name the Hall of Famer who, when asked if he had ever felt more pressure than when he pitched in the World Series, said, “Well, there was the Battle of the Bulge.”
4. What event in the life of what player provoked old-school wisecracking actor/composer Oscar Levant to say, “It proves that no man can be a success at two national pastimes”?
5. To what was Cesar Geronimo referring when he said he was just “in the right place at the right time”? (This is my favorite.)
6. What do most Little Leaguers do when, around age 8, they are told they have to wear protective cups, that it’s a league rule?
7. When do most Little Leaguers decide that a protective cup is actually a good thing?
8. When one team with a big lead kept stealing bases, two major league managers got in a fight at home plate in a game in July of 1985. (I saw it live and it was one of the great nights of my life.) Which manager said afterward, “If he promises to stop hitting home runs, I promise to stop stealing bases,” and which opposing manager was he talking about?
9. Who wins the 2010 World Series?

Answers

1. With runners on first and second, the batter hit a pop-up and was out under the infield fly rule. The runner on first passed the runner on second and was out; the falling pop hit the runner on second.
2. Yes. (What’s on second.)
3. The Braves’ Warren Spahn.
4. Joe DiMaggio’s divorce from Marilyn Monroe.
5. He was both Bob Gibson’s and Nolan Ryan’s 3,000th strikeout victim.
6. The ones that don’t cry just look at you like you are Satan, Satan with a banana growing out of his ear.
7. Right after they recover from getting hit ‘on home plate’ that first time.
8. St. Louis manager Whitey Herzog about San Francisco’s Roger Craig, who was managing several former Shreveport Captains at the time.
9. In an all-wild card Series, Atlanta beats Boston. (With the benefit of hindsight, we can report that he San Francisco Giants beat the Texas Rangers, 4-1, in the 2010 World Series. Atlanta was beaten by the Giants in the NL Division Series; Boston didn’t make the postseason.)

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As part of our agreement with the American Historical Association, we are legally obligated to bring you, on occasion, This Day In Happen History:

On April 24, 1184 B.C., the Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse (traditional date): This is the “traditional date” because no one thought, at the time, to grab some papyrus and a quill and jot it down. But you know those zany Greeks… (Alexandros: “Did they pull us into the city Tuesday or Wednesday?” Kostas: “How am I supposed to know? I was driving. I think it was Friday. Ask Vagellis.”) And if the Troy folk were stupid enough to pull a giant wooden horse inside the city walls and not think to check it out — as if Santa Cicero had brought it — they deserved to be conquered. (And can you hear them planning this back in Greece? “Dimitri, it’ll never work! But maybe…maybe…it’s just stupid enough.. let’s give it a try! Somebody go get me a really big piece of wood!”

April 24, 1888: George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Company. Sadly, no one took a picture.

April 24, 1895: Joshua Slocum completes around-the-world voyage in 11-m boat. (April 25, 1895: Joshua “Oars” Slocum gets drunk as Cooter Brown.)

April 24, 1901: 1st AL game, Chicago beats Cleveland Blues 8-2, three other games rained out. (ESPN shows Yankees-Red Sox highlights anyway, and barely mentions Chicago’s W over the Blues.)

April 24, 1915:  Pitts’ Frank Allen no-hits St Louis (Federal League), 2-0. (Federal League rained out after only two seasons.)

April 24, 1945: Albert B. “Happy” Chandler is named second baseball commissioner. (Coincidentally, at the press conference announcing his commissionership, Happy cries, and all the snap-brim-hatted sportswriters look at each other and say, without saying, “Well THIS is awkward…”

April 24, 1956: AL umpire Frank Umont is first to wear glasses in a regular season game. This is also the first day a fan ever yelled “HEY, BLUE! YOU’RE MISSING A GREAT GAME! GET A PAIR OF GLA…! Oh, never mind.”

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