Fact: A solid foundation of sports knowledge will never be held against you.
You can use it for small talk, impressing strangers and making friends when you’ve been dragged to dinner parties. Also, in the rare event you end up on a gameshow, a command of sporting trivia can help make you cash money.
Unfortunately for three Jeopardy! contestants, a lack of baseball trivia led to a group miss on a recent airing of the show. The footage was spotted by John Ferensen of Next Impulse Sports. The answer they faced?
“354 wins did not overcome the controversy as this ex-Red Sox pitcher didn’t make the Hall of Fame cut in 2013.”
The contestants gave it a whack, but they unfortunately came up short. As it turns out, neither “Pete Rose,” “Curt Schilling” or “Mark McGwire” were the exact hard-throwing Red Sox pitcher Trebek was looking for.
The name Trebek was looking for was “Roger Clemens.”
To their credit, they tried.
Each of the three contestants rattled off a question that included the name of a retired baseball player whose name has come up in HOF conversation. They deserve a measure of credit for that.
We all have at least one friend who hates baseball—despises it and thinks it’s worse than watching a stump and a jar of paint debate Bird Law on CSPAN. That friend is probably less knowledgeable than these contestants.
A few of your baseball-hating friends probably don’t even know who Rose is, so keep that in mind before you go crazy with the off-color jokes on these three.
With that being said, it’s moments like these that make you grateful to have a face and a palm.
Look for Jeopardy! to keep mining the sports trivia in the name of saving some cash. It’s a popular subject, and evidently, some of the subject matter can be confounding.
Which basketball player spawned the ‘Air Jordan’ shoeline? I’m sorry, “Wilt Chamberlain” is incorrect.
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