Yankee4Life

10 out of 10, 42 seconds. This one was an easy one. Only one more for 2022!

4 out of 10, 45 seconds. I didn't know what I was doing.

9 out of 10, 59 seconds. There always has to be one that gets me.

7 out of 10, 61 seconds. Best score yet for intermediate questions.

8 out of 10, 68 seconds. It seems like every day I am missing stupid ones.

10 out of 10, 54 seconds. And Merry Christmas to all of us who play this game.

6 out of 10, 76 seconds. There were some puzzlers today.

6 out of 10, 48 seconds. I only knew two of them.

8 out of 10, 61 seconds. I don't know how I missed the Babe Ruth question.

6 out of 10, 36 seconds. With these kind of questions I just click-click-click and hope for the best.

6 out of 10, 70 seconds. I thought I did better but when I got my score I was really surprised.

10 out of 10, 45 seconds. The questions today made it very easy.

9 out of 10, 65 seconds. Not an easy one today.

10 out of 10, 49 seconds. That is more like it.

Tris Speaker Note: This photo was taken in September of 1920. The arm band that Speaker has on is in honor of shortstop Ray Chapman, who was killed by a pitched ball on August 17, 1920. Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb’s friendly rival as the greatest center fielder of the Deadball Era, could field and throw better than the Georgia Peach even if he could not quite match him as a hitter. Legendary for his short outfield play, Speaker led the American League in putouts seven times and in double plays six times in a 22-year career with Boston, Cleveland, Washington, and Philadelphia. Speaker’s career totals in both categories are still major-league records at his position. No slouch at the plate, Speaker had a lifetime batting average of .345, sixth on the all-time list, and no one has surpassed his career mark of 792 doubles. He was also one of the game’s most successful player-managers. “You can write him down as one of the two models of ball-playing grace,” Grantland Rice wrote of the Grey Eagle. “The other was Napoleon Lajoie. Neither ever wasted a motion or gave you any sign of extra effort. … They had the same elements that made a Bobby Jones or the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame — the smoothness of a summer wind.” A born right-hander, young Tris taught himself to throw left-handed when he twice broke his right arm after being thrown from a bronco. Soon he began to bat left-handed as well. In 1906 Speaker wrote several professional teams asking for a tryout and was signed by Cleburne of the Texas League for $50 per month. Tris bombed as a pitcher – he lost six straight games and once reportedly gave up 22 straight hits, all for extra bases – but as an outfielder he hit .268 and stole 33 bases in 84 games. When the North Texas League and South Texas League were consolidated in 1907, Speaker moved to Houston and hit a league-leading .314 with 36 steals in 118 games. The Boston Red Sox purchased Speaker’s contract at the end of the 1907 season. He appeared in seven games for the big club, but hit only .158. Unimpressed with his play, the Red Sox did not send Speaker a contract for 1908. Speaker twice begged John McGraw for a chance to play for the New York Giants, to no avail, and was also rebuffed by several other major-league clubs. Finally, Speaker paid his own way to Boston’s Little Rock training camp to work out with the Red Sox. At the end of spring training, the Red Sox turned his contract over to Little Rock of the Southern Association as payment for the rent of the training field. There was one stipulation: If Speaker developed, Boston had the right to repurchase him for $500. Well, he did. Speaker led the Southern Association in hitting in 1908 with a .350 average stole 28 bases, and drew raves for his outfield play. Despite interest from the Pittsburgh Pirates, Brooklyn Superbas, Washington Senators, and, at last, the Giants, the Travelers sold Speaker back to Boston. Speaker hit only .224 in 31 games for the Red Sox in 1909, but was flawless in the outfield. Speaker further honed his outfield skills by working with Red Sox pitcher Cy Young. “When I was a rookie,” Speaker later recalled, Young “used to hit me flies to sharpen my abilities to judge in advance the direction and distance of an outfield ball.” Speaker led Boston to world championships in two of the next seven seasons, 1912 and 1915, hitting above .300 every year and perennially ranking among American League leaders in most offensive and defensive categories. With teammates Harry Hooper and Duffy Lewis, Speaker formed one of the best fielding outfields in history. During this period Speaker led AL center fielders in putouts five times and in double plays four times. Twice he had 35 assists, the American League record. Relations between the Grey Eagle and team president Joe Lannin were also far from warm. After the Red Sox World Series victory in 1915, Lannin angered Speaker by proposing that the outfielder’s salary be cut from about $18,000 – higher at the time than that of Ty Cobb – to $9,000, since Speaker’s batting average had declined three years in a row. (Lannin had raised Speaker’s salary in 1914 to keep him from jumping to the Federal League’s Brooklyn Club, which had offered Speaker a three-year contract for $100,000 to be its player-manager). When Speaker held out, Lannin traded him to Cleveland for Sam Jones, Fred Thomas, and $55,000. Speaker received a massive outpouring of affection from the fans when he returned to Boston in a Cleveland uniform on May 9, 1916, and even mistakenly headed toward the Red Sox dugout at the end of one inning. Boston pitchers, meanwhile, complained that without Spoke in center, they could no longer groove fastballs when behind in the count, certain that he would catch everything hit his way. The Red Sox won the World Series again, but Speaker became the idol of Indians fans and hit even better with his new club than he had in Boston. In the outfield Speaker played so shallow that he was almost a fifth infielder. “At the crack of the bat he’d be off with his back to the infield,” said teammate Joe Wood, “and then he’d turn and glance over his shoulder at the last minute and catch the ball so easy it looked like there was nothing to it, nothing at all.” Twice in one month, April 1918, Speaker executed unassisted double plays at second base, catching low line drives on the run and then beating the baserunner to the bag. At least once in his career Speaker was the pivot man in a routine double play. As late as 1923, after the advent of the lively ball forced Speaker to play deeper, he still had 26 assists. He was a remarkably consistent batter. In 1912, Speaker set a major-league record with three separate hitting streaks of 20 or more games, while his 11 consecutive hits in 1920 set a mark that went unsurpassed for 18 years. Speaker’s major weakness as a batter was the slow, high, curve. Speaker spent 11 seasons with the Indians, compiling a batting mark that averaged over .350. He paced the American League in doubles four straight seasons. As late as 1925, the 37-year-old outfielder hit .389 in 117 games. The following year, his final season with Cleveland, he hit .304 in 150 games. As player-manager, Speaker piloted Cleveland to a 617-520 record (.543) between 1919 and 1926. The Indians club he took to the World Series in 1920 had been demoralized by the midseason death of shortstop Ray Chapman when he was beaned by Carl Mays. Speaker rallied the team and in the Series, Cleveland defeated Brooklyn five games to two. After the 1926 season, Hubert “Dutch” Leonard, a disgruntled former teammate, accused Speaker and Cobb of fixing a game in 1919. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis cleared both men of the charges, but by that time American League President Ban Johnson, who believed the men guilty, had persuaded Cobb and Speaker to resign in order to protect baseball’s image. In February 1927, Speaker signed with the Washington Senators, where he hit .327. Speaker finished his major-league career with Cobb on Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in 1928. He spent 1929 and 1930 as the player-manager of the Newark Bears in the International League, where he hit .355 and .419 in limited play. Speaker's major league playing career ended after 1928. He retired with 792 doubles, an all-time career record. Defensively, Speaker holds the all-time career records for assists as an outfielder and double plays as an outfielder. He remains the last batter to hit 200 triples in a career.

2 out of 10, 37 seconds. Um, can I have a do-over? 😲

9 out of 10, 67 seconds. A lot better than yesterday.

3 out of 10, 33 seconds. I got the first seven in a row wrong.

3 out of 10, 73 seconds. I am almost embarrassed to post what I did today in here. It was awful.

10 out of 10, 44 seconds. Three days in a row!

10 out of 10, 43 seconds. For difficult questions they really were not.

10 out of 10, 53 seconds. A lot of questions that they seemed to hand you the answers. Just watch you guys, tomorrow is going to be hard.

3 out of 10, 29 seconds. Yikes!

6 out of 10, 66 seconds. I got stumped on a lot of them.