* One-shot deals

With the Mets season just about over, I needed to find new ways to amuse myself.

When I was a kid at day camp, we used to play this game, “initials.” One player would think of the name of some baseball player, the other would try to guess. You got a home run if you managed to get it just from the initials. If you need one clue (the first was the league), it was a triple. Get it on the next try, with the team, it was a double. Finally, a single if you needed the position. If you didn’t get out, you were outta there.

So it was with a sense of nostalgia that I read Wayne Stewart’s Name That Ballplayer: The Ultimate Baseball “Whodunnit” Quiz (Skyhorse Publishing).

The paperback contains 300 questions, three clues each, broken down into degree of difficulty: batting practice serves as a warm-up, followed by early innings, middle innings, and stretch innings. Depending on your age and interest, the questions will be easy or difficult. For example, I did very well with players from the 1970s and before, although I did pretty well overall, perhaps missing 30 questions. Not meaning to brag, but most of them, especially those from the 50s and 60s, were pretty easy and I got them before finishing the first clue. Kind of like the old TV show, Name That Tune. It was a nice blast from the past.

But I defy anyone but the most hardened Cubs or minor league fans to tell me who Jeff Samardzija is. Here are the clues:

In college, this player gained a great deal of renown on the gridiron as a receiver for a major football “factory,” playing in his final game during the 2006 (bowing out with a loss to LSU in the Sugar Bowl, where he hauled in a touchdown pass). He was, according to an Associated Press report, “projected as a first-round (NFL) pick….”
Instead of football, this right-handed pitcher signed a five-year deal with the Cubs worth $10 million in January of 2007. He had been the Cubs’ fifth-round pick in the 2006 amateur draft, and started seven games for two Cubs minor league teams, posting a 2.70 ERA.
Up from the farm system in 2008, he registered an ERA of 2.28, bolstering the Cubs bullpen.

Those who compile quiz books like this have to be careful. What kind of audience are you writing to? You have to gauge questions accordingly. Too easy, and you insult the real students of the game. Too hard and you can turn off your reader before the first few questions have been viewed. And please, no ridiculous queries like “Which right-handed, blue-eyed infielder from a mid-Atlantic state whose birthday lands on a day whose square root is the same as the gravity on Saturn led his team in triples that got by foreign-born vegetarians whose waist size equals the number of carrots in diamonds from the mines of Zanzibar that were dugout out on rainy days in November.” There’s trivia, and then there’s trivia.

And one final, but major, concern: These types of quiz books can be interesting for awhile, but you can really on play them once, can’t you?