Yankee4Life

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.

7 out of 10, 51 seconds. This had to be one of my best ones because I only knew two of the answers.

9 out of 10, 57 seconds. Not bad but sometimes these difficult questions can be impossible.

10 out of 10, 39 seconds. I think this was one of my best ever.

7 out of 10, 91 seconds. A couple of really tough ones today.

10 out of 10, 44 seconds. Thankfully an easy one today. I get stumped when they ask soccer questions.

9 out of 10, 55 seconds. A nice way to start the month. Oh, on an added note Fiebre was the winner for the month of November with 95 points. I came in second with 91 points followed by laroquece with 84 points. It was close. Fiebre also won the month of October. Good going! All I wish is that we had more people to play each day.

4 out of 10, 73 seconds. What a lousy way to end the month.

Pie Traynor Harold Joseph Traynor was born on November 11, 1898, in Framingham, Massachusetts, about 22 miles west of Boston. When Harold was 5 years old, the family relocated to Somerville, three miles northwest of downtown Boston, and soon he was nagging the older boys in his neighborhood to let him join their baseball games. When they finally gave in, they put 6-year-old Harold behind the plate — without a mask. In his first game, a pitch smacked him in the mouth and knocked out two teeth.Undeterred by that rough initiation, Harold became a fixture at the neighborhood games, where he met the man who tagged him with his memorable nickname. Traynor and the other kids in his neighborhood befriended a slightly older boy named Ben Nangle, whose family owned a popular corner store. “The kids, in fact nearly everybody in town, used to gather at [the] store in the afternoon or evening,” according to Traynor. Nangle sometimes would umpire the younger children’s games and then parade them back to the store. When they arrived, Nangle would ask them what they wanted. Without fail, Traynor would request a slice of pie. Nangle took to calling him “Pie Face,” which his buddies later shortened to “Pie.” His father made a decent living working as a typesetter for the Boston Transcript, but with such a large family to feed, young Pie had to pull his weight. Starting at the age of 12, he worked after school as a messenger boy and office hand, adding a few extra dollars to the family war chest. When he wasn’t at school or work, Pie played pickup baseball games on Boston Common and for his high-school team in Somerville. After the war, Traynor managed to secure a tryout with the Boston Braves. “I wanted to play for the Braves ever since I was a little boy in Framingham,” he said. But the tryout was a disaster. He started out by taking some groundballs during batting practice. “Then the bell rang for fielding practice and I stayed in the infield,” he remembered. “I didn’t even know what the bell meant. I soon found out. [Braves manager] George Stallings ran me out of there in a hurry and I was so scared I never came back.” Instead, he spent the summer of 1919 playing for Falmouth in the Cape League (later known as the Cape Cod League). The next spring, though, Boston Record sportswriter Eddie Hurley arranged for Traynor to work out with the Boston Red Sox. Veteran pitcher Joe Bush watched Traynor pick groundball after groundball during batting practice. “I grabbed a fungo stick one day and yelled to him, ‘Hey, Sonny, let’s see you get the ones I’m going to hit you.’ The kid was amazing.” But veteran Red Sox shortstop Everett Scott, perhaps with an eye toward protecting his own job, told manager Ed Barrow that he wasn’t all that impressed. So instead of signing Traynor, Barrow recommended him to Portsmouth of the Class-B Virginia League, a team with which the Red Sox had an unofficial but not legally binding working relationship. Traynor signed with Portsmouth for $200 a month on May 11, 1920. According to Barrow, “I made it plain [to Portsmouth owner H.P. Dawson] he belonged to Boston, even though I hadn’t signed him to a Red Sox contract.” Batting leadoff and playing shortstop, Traynor batted .270 in 104 games. Although his glove work was suspect (31 errors), major-league teams took notice. So Dawson, who obviously looked at Portsmouth’s relationship with the Red Sox a little differently than Barrow did, sat back and dangled Traynor before one suitor after another. The New York Giants wanted Traynor, but refused to pay more than $7,500, an offer Dawson dismissed. Washington Senators owner Calvin Griffith, still annoyed more than a quarter-century later, claimed that Traynor should have been his. “They owed me the pick of their club in exchange for three ballplayers I sent them the summer before,” Griffith griped to Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich in 1947. “So I picked Traynor and thought he belonged to me. Then the owner weaseled out of it. He told me I’d have to give him $5,000 extra. … If we’d have had Traynor for third base and [Ossie] Bluege for shortstop we would have won four straight pennants instead of two.” On September 11, 1920, it was the Pittsburgh Pirates who, on the recommendation of scout Tom McNamara, finally met Dawson’s asking price, shelling out $10,000 for Traynor; up to that point it was the largest amount ever paid for a Virginia League player. Like Griffith, Barrow thought he’d been had. “I hit the ceiling. I grabbed the phone and called Dawson and called him everything I could think of.” He even appealed to American League President Ban Johnson, but there was nothing Johnson could do. The Red Sox had just let one of the best players of his generation slip through their fingers. “I never stopped giving Barrow the needle about his mistake,” said Bush. From 1923 until injuries started to take their toll around 1929, Traynor probably was the best defensive third baseman in baseball. He was 6 feet tall, which was large for a third baseman of his era, but very agile. He was brilliant at charging bunts and weakly hit groundballs, and had a knack for moving quickly to his right and making backhanded stops. “Pie had the quickest hands, the quickest arm of any third baseman,” said former teammate Charlie Grimm. “And from any angle he threw strikes.” The Cubs’ Billy Herman agreed. “Most marvelous pair of hands you’d ever want to see.” To columnist Red Smith, watching Traynor play third was “like looking over daVinci’s shoulder.” Traynor led National League third basemen in assists three times, putouts seven times, and double plays four times. His biggest defensive flaw was his arm — extremely strong, but often wild; but he learned how to compensate, according to Herman. “You’d hit a shot at him, a play that he could take his time on, and he’d catch it and throw it right quick, so that if his peg was wild, the first baseman had time to get off the bag, take the throw, and get back on again. It was the only way Traynor could throw; if he took his time, he was really wild.” Traynor established himself as an offensive force in 1923, putting together what might have been his best overall season at the plate. He hit .338 with a career-high 12 home runs and 101 RBIs. His 19 triples tied teammate Max Carey for tops in the major leagues, and his 28 stolen bases were also a career best. The Giants set the pace in the National League early in 1925, but by mid-June the Pirates were charging hard. After the Pirates beat the Giants 13-11 in 10 innings on June 16 to complete a four-game sweep), Harry Cross of the New York Times wrote of the Giants, “Their temperature is far above normal, respiration is alarming, blood pressure is kiting, and they are suffering from housemaid’s knee and their appetites have gone blooey.” The rumors of the Giants’ death were greatly exaggerated, though; they went back and forth with the Pirates until August. But from August 26 through September 23 Pittsburgh won 22 of 30 games, including a pair of nine-game winning streaks, and took the pennant by 8½ games. Traynor was marvelous, batting .320 with 106 RBIs, and leading third basemen in fielding percentage and total chances. His 41 double plays set a National League record for third basemen that stood for 25 years; four of those double plays came in one game, which set a major-league record later tied by Johnny Vergez in 1935. After having an abscess on his hip lanced in late September, Traynor was fully healthy for the World Series matchup against defending champion Washington. In Game One, Traynor homered off Walter Johnson and made a spectacular diving grab of a Muddy Ruel smash, but the Senators won, 4-1. Down three games to one, the Bucs rallied to force a classic Game Seven. In the rain and muck of Forbes Field, the Senators touched Vic Aldridge for four runs in the first inning. But Pittsburgh chipped away; in the seventh inning, Traynor rocketed an RBI triple deep into the fog to tie the game, 6-6. He was tagged out trying to stretch it into a home run. Then with the score tied 7-7 in the bottom of the eighth, Kiki Cuyler lashed a bases-loaded two-run double off a worn-out Johnson to give the Pirates their second World Series championship. The 1927 Pirates added little Lloyd Waner to the lineup. Traynor took one look at the 132-pound Waner and deemed him “too small, too thin, and too scrawny.” But his .355 batting average helped propel the Pirates to another National League pennant, as they edged out St. Louis and the Giants in a spirited race. Traynor batted .342, drove in 106 runs, finished seventh in the National League MVP voting, and was The Sporting News‘ all-star third baseman for the third straight season. In the World Series, Pittsburgh was merely fresh meat for the ’27 Yankees, perhaps the greatest team ever. “We had just gone through as tough a pennant race as you could image … and we were worn to a bone,” recalled Traynor. He claimed that he was down to 150 pounds (from his normal playing weight of 170), while Paul and Lloyd Waner had shriveled to 125 and 127 pounds, respectively. “We were whipped before we took the field,” Traynor remarked. Legend has it that prior to Game One the young Pirates stood in front of their dugout mesmerized as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig sent one towering drive after another out of the park. Traynor always asserted that was bunk. “It’s just not true. We finished our batting practice and immediately went in for a clubhouse meeting.” There is no disputing what happened once the games began, however. The Yankees ripped through the Pirates in four straight, winning the deciding game on a wild pitch by Johnny Miljus in the bottom of the ninth. A nasty eye infection had Traynor on the sidelines for several weeks during the spring of 1930. It was so bad that he could hardly see out of his left eye. Thinking that the infection stemmed from another infection in his teeth, doctors resorted to pulling two teeth in hopes of clearing the bacteria from his system; even after his vision returned to full strength, Traynor still had to wear smoked glasses to protect his eye from the sunlight. He didn’t return to the lineup full time until late May, but he compiled the highest batting average (.366) and on-base percentage (.423) of his career. The Pirates struggled to a fifth-place finish in 1931 and Traynor was a big reason why. His defense was well below its usual standard, due in large part to a sore throwing arm that he nursed all season. It was a bit of an ordeal at the plate for him, too; for the first time in seven seasons, Traynor fell short of the .300 mark, at .298. Nonetheless, he drove in over 100 runs (103, to be precise) for the fifth straight year. Traynor and the Pirates both enjoyed nice recoveries in 1932. Although a sore shoulder in late May snapped his streak of 317 consecutive games played, Traynor boosted his average back up to .329, tightened up his defense a bit, and finished third (behind Chuck Klein and Lefty O’Doul) in the balloting for The Sporting News‘ National League MVP. Against the Boston Braves on August 30, he recorded his 2,000th career hit. The Pirates entered August leading the National League by 5½ games, but a 10-20 record that month doomed them to second place, four games behind Chicago. The Cincinnati Reds wanted Traynor as their player-manager for 1933, but Traynor said he wasn’t interested — and even if he were, Pirates management wasn’t about to let him go. In ’33, the Pirates again came home in second place, this time five games behind the Giants. Traynor hit .304 and was named to his seventh and final Sporting News all-star team. On July 6 he appeared as a pinch-hitter in the inaugural major-league All-Star Game at Comiskey Park, doubling off Lefty Grove in the seventh inning. The Pirates started strong in 1934. On May 24 they moved into first place, thanks in part to a reinvigorated Traynor, who was batting .469 (Traynor had played in only 13 games by this point thanks to a shoulder that sometimes hurt so much that he could hardly sleep). By June, though, the Pirates were in a tailspin and the fans, frustrated by the near misses of ’32 and ’33, had turned on Gibson. At a June 17 game, which the Pirates lost, 9-3, a crowd of 16,000 booed Gibson lustily every time he stuck his head out of the dugout. Two days later, with the Pirates 27-24 but losers of seven of their last eight games, Pirates president Bill Benswanger released Gibson and asked a stunned Traynor to take over as player-manager. The Bucs won 10 of their first 16 games under Traynor; however, much of that record was built up against second-division punching bags Cincinnati and Philadelphia. During one of those games in Philadelphia he suffered an injury from which he would never fully recover. Traynor overslid the plate on a close play at home, and as he reached back to touch it, catcher Jimmie Wilson fell on his arm. “I felt something snap and was certain I had a broken arm,” said Traynor. “I didn’t, but I couldn’t throw well anymore.” Just when it appeared Pittsburgh was crawling back into the race, the Pirates lost nine straight in July and freefell out of contention, eventually finishing in fifth place. Through it all, Traynor appeared to be teetering on the edge of nervous breakdown. Traynor was, in many ways, psychologically unsuited for the role of major-league manager. By August he had lost 10 pounds in two months, appeared remarkably gaunt, and had all but stopped sleeping. Traynor played in 57 games in 1935, but the Pirates likely would have been better off if he hadn’t. He batted around .230 for much of the year. A late surge got him up to .279, but that was still the lowest mark of his career for a full season. Traynor’s playing days quietly melted away. He spent the 1935-36 offseason working with doctors in Cincinnati and California trying to get his arm in shape. He came to spring training with plans to play if he had to, but Cookie Lavagetto and perennial prospect Bill Brubaker showed enough promise at third base that Traynor decided not to take the field at all in 1936, although he kept himself on the active roster. In July 1937 injuries forced Traynor back into the lineup for a series against the Dodgers. He hadn’t taken infield or batting practice in weeks and admitted before his first game back, “I’m nervous as a bride. I’m really a little scared.” Then 1938. The Pirates caught fire in June and July, going 40-14 over those months, including a 13-game winning streak. They entered September with a comfortable seven-game lead over the Chicago Cubs. Chicago player-manager Gabby Hartnett returned from a broken thumb in September, and the Cubs immediately started playing their best baseball of the year. But still, seven games seemed a lot to overcome. Giants manager Bill Terry joked that the Pirates ought to quit baseball if they blew the lead. Traynor was irate when he read that, but a lot people agreed with Terry. On September 21, with the lead down to 3½ games, Shirley Povich wrote in the Washington Post that the World Series was coming to Pittsburgh “unless the Pirates suffer a complete collapse.” The next day Roscoe McGowen of the New York Times predicted that nothing short of “the greatest flop in history” would keep the Pirates from the pennant. A Chicago Tribune headline blared “Cubs Must Work Miracle.” The Pirates moved ahead with the sale of World Series tickets (they sold $1.5 million worth) and the construction of special bleachers at Forbes Field. But the Cubs didn’t care. They just kept on winning. On September 27 the Cubs won the first game of the series, 2-1, to close to within a half-game. Then the next day, with darkness approaching, Hartnett smacked a Mace Brown pitch over the wall in the bottom of the ninth to give the Cubs a 6-5 victory. The home run became known in Cubs lore as the “Homer in the Gloamin’.” Although Pittsburgh still had five games remaining, that blow by Hartnett shattered their spirit. The Cubs won the next day, 10-1, and officially clinched the pennant on October 1. In 1939 the Bucs hung around the periphery of the pennant race for a while, but a 12-game losing streak in August doomed the Pirates to their worst finish in 22 years. On September 28, exactly one year removed from Hartnett’s crushing homer, Traynor tendered his resignation, and accepted a job within the organization as a scout. In a seventeen-year major league career, Traynor played in 1,941 games, accumulating 2,416 hits in 7,559 at bats for a .320 career batting average along with 58 home runs, 1,273 runs batted in and an on-base percentage of .362. He retired with a .946 fielding percentage.

Arky Vaughan Arky Vaughan’s career achievements were remarkable. In 1935 Vaughan led the National League with a .385 batting average, and his .318 lifetime average is second among all shortstops to Honus Wagner’s .327. Over his career Vaughan walked 937 times, while striking out just 276 times. He was among the most difficult players to double up, grounding into only seventy double plays in the last thirteen years of his fourteen-year career. (GIDP was not tracked in 1932). Vaughan’s on-base average was an impressive .406 while his slugging percentage was a highly respectable .453. An All-Star selection for nine consecutive years, he compiled a .364 batting average in All-Star Games, and he was the first player to hit two home runs in one. Joseph Floyd Vaughan was born on March 9, 1912, in Clifty, Arkansas, a farm village about twenty-five miles northeast of Fayetteville. When Arky was seven months old, his parents, Robert and Laura Vaughan, moved the family, including two older sisters, to Mendocino County near San Francisco. They later relocated to Fullerton, California, where Robert found work in the California oilfields. Joseph Floyd Vaughan’s childhood friends began calling him Arky as soon as they learned of his birthplace, and he was known as Arky Vaughan for the rest of his life. Playing his first season of professional baseball for the 1931 Wichita Aviators of the Class A Western League, the nineteen-year-old Vaughan made an immediate impact. He batted .338 with twenty-one home runs, eighty-one runs batted in, and a league-leading 145 runs scored and forty-three stolen bases. Vaughan’s performance earned him a promotion to the Pirates. No-hit, good-field Tommy Thevenow had been the Pirates’ regular shortstop in 1931, and manager George Gibson started him at the position in the 1932 opener. Five days later, on April 17, the twenty-year-old Vaughan made his major-league debut, striking out as a pinch-hitter against Cincinnati’s Larry Benton. Vaughan got his first start at shortstop on April 28, after Thevenow broke a finger. The left-handed hitting Californian made an impressive debut with two triples and three runs batted in. The next day, facing future Hall of Fame pitcher Eppa Rixey, Vaughan went 2-for-4. Now firmly established as the Pirates’ starting shortstop, Vaughan had a 5-for-5 day on June 7. He hit his first major-league home run on July 26, off Jim Mooney of the New York Giants. Vaughan’s rookie batting average was .318, but he struggled in the field, committing a league-leading forty-six errors. On August 11, Vaughan the youngest player in the National League, made a crucial error in the tenth inning that allowed the Chicago Cubs to beat Pittsburgh and take over first place in the National League. The Pirates eventually finished second, four games behind the Cubs. In 1933 Vaughan played shortstop in all but two of the Pirates’ games and began to exhibit good power as well as outstanding speed. On May 1 he and catcher Earl Grace both slugged grand slams in a rout of the Philadelphia Phillies. For Vaughan, whose home run was inside-the-park, it was the first of his four major-league grand slams. On June 24, he hit for the cycle, going 5-for-5 with five RBIs against Brooklyn. In 1935 Vaughan had the best season of his career. He was hitting .401 in mid-September, but an eight-game slump lowered his final batting average to .385. Arky led the league in walks (97), on-base percentage (.491) and slugging percentage (.607), and his nineteen home runs and ninety-nine runs batted in were career highs. His .491 on-base percentage remains the highest ever for a Pirates’ player. Vaughan finished third in the baseball writers vote for the National League’s Most Valuable Player; however, The Sporting News selected him as their MVP in the National League and the shortstop on their postseason Major League All-Star team. In 1940, under new manager Frankie Frisch, Vaughan batted an even .300, drove in ninety-five runs, and led the National League in runs scored and triples. The 1941 season was Vaughan’s last year in Pittsburgh. Playing in only 106 games, he hit .316 with six home runs and just thirty-eight RBIs. Vaughan’s playing time was limited by two injuries. In midseason he suffered a spike wound and was out of the lineup for two weeks. Then, on August 30, he suffered a concussion when he was hit in the head by a pitch during an exhibition game in London, Ontario. Vaughan tried to return to the lineup, but he had severe headaches, and the team doctors ordered him to bed. Despite his drop in production, Vaughan was again selected as the starting shortstop for the National League All-Star team. In the All-Star Game at Briggs Stadium in Detroit, Vaughan had perhaps his most memorable performance. After getting a single early in the contest, he homered in the seventh with a man on base, putting the National League ahead, 3–2. In the next inning, Vaughan hit his second successive two-run homer, raising the National League’s lead to 5–2. Vaughan appeared to be the day’s hero until Ted Williams of the Red Sox won the game for the American League, 7–5, with a dramatic ninth-inning, three-run homer. The Dodgers won the National League pennant in 1947, and Vaughan had an opportunity to play in his only World Series. Facing the Yankees, Vaughan drew a walk and belted a double in three pinch-hitting appearances. Vaughan returned to the Dodgers in 1948 as a part-time player, but by 1949, wanting to be closer to home, he joined the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. In his final season of professional baseball, Arky batted .288 in ninety-seven games. Following his retirement from baseball, Vaughan devoted all his energies to his family, his ranch, and his hobby of fishing. On August 30, 1952, he and a friend, Bill Wimer, sailed their fishing boat to Lost Lake, east of the Northern California town of Eagleville. The lake, in the crater of an extinct volcano, had reportedly never been sounded. The skiff capsized and, according to a witness, Vaughan and Wimer started swimming for shore. The men swam about sixty-five yards in the chilly water and were only twenty feet from shore when they sank in water that was twenty feet deep. Later reports stated that Vaughan was trying to save Wimer, who, it was reported, could not swim. Their bodies were recovered early the next morning. Vaughan was forty years old. Ignoring his accomplishments, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America never gave Vaughan more than 29 percent of their votes for the Baseball Hall of Fame. (75 percent is required for election.) Vaughan dropped off the BBWAA ballot after 1968, and not until 1985 did he at last gain election, by a vote of the Veterans’ Committee. Yet Arky Vaughan remains relatively unknown in comparison to his fellow Hall of Famers. Overlooked and underappreciated, Vaughan ranks among the top shortstops and offensive stars of his or any era.

9 out of 10, 87 seconds. Tough but fair questions today.

10 out of 10, 41 seconds. Easy questions! I mean there is no way anyone will have missed question two (Which of the following players' last name, does NOT start with a "G"?)

4 out of 10, 79 seconds. This was really tough today.

10 out of 10, 46 seconds. A good comeback.

5 out of 10, 55 seconds. I am terrible guessing what college some guy went to. What do I care?

2 out of 10, 41 seconds. I believe this is my worst one ever.

6 out of 10, 81 seconds. Not a good day at all.