The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial

(NOTE:  This update was written early Friday evening, Sept 30, covering games through Thursday, Sept. 29. It was initially given no category, so no one saw it other than maybe Dave.  I recategorized it early on Saturday evening, Sept. 30.)

Ryan and I are in a trivia contest called the Learned League.  Friday we finished a 5-week season with quizzes every work day (25 in all), each quiz having 6 questions, and each day facing off against a different opponent, against whom you can play defense by how you set the values of the questions for them. The questions can be on any topic. They are seldom about baseball, which might explain why both of us struggle.  In the season we just finished, I ended 11 – 12 – 2, and Ryan…. well, he did even worse.

On the last day, here was question #1:

To save you having to click there, here is the picture:

42% of Learned League contestants got this one right.  I’ll give you a hint: the most common wrong answer was Bryce Harper (6%). This means 52% of contestants guessed someone else, with no more than 6% guessing any other single person. (My truly brilliant daughter Melissa is also a Learned League member. She guessed Ace McBattyface.  That is not the right answer.)

That takes care of the good.  Now for the bad and the ugly:

Who is this?  Bill James says he ranks #1 all time on one of our remaining criteria.  As for the other — well, surprisingly (to me) he had a 12-year MLB career in which he amassed a total of about 25 WAR — so he was worth an average of 2 WAR a year, definitely above average. So maybe we need someone else here:

This EWIe “leads” MLB in negative WAR this year, at -2.4 fWAR.  He’s got the title sewn up since the man in second place (Gerardo Parra) only has -1.8 fWAR with three games to go. Our mystery man is not like Altuve, Segura, etc: EWIes who thrive. He’s one who stinks like a EWIe should.  Can you name him?

The rest of the Learned League last day of the season went like this:

I got 4 of these right, thanks to a good guess on #5.  I should have gotten #4 right — 67% of Learned League contestants did — but I blanked on it.  #6 was completely out of the question for me, along with 83% of Learned Leaguers (called LLamas).  Four right is pretty good for me, since I only get 46.1% of the questions right on average.

I beat my opponent, a female Yale University alumna, 6(4)-0(1) — which means I earned 6 points for my 4 right answers (she thought I would get #6 right, silly woman, so valued it at 0 for me) (she knew I was from Oregon, so in her cute Yale-educated way, probably assumed I swam in a country-music-infused milieu) (and yes, I see the stereotype-infused irony in my making that comment), and I pitched a 1-hit shutout against her (I valued #3 at 0 for her, the only one she got right) (I assumed, in my cute male way, that she would recognize the item pictured in #3). I finished 15th out of 28 in the rundle both Ryan and I were in (there are hundreds of rundles, I think).  She finished 14th, so this was a big win for me against a  well-matched opponent.

If you’d like to try the Learned League once for free, I (or Ryan) can nominate you for membership. The next season begins in November. It could be a fun offseason consolation.

Ok, on to the standings after Thursday’s games and…