Sporcle Saturday: Chain of Teammates

Hey, gang! In case you didn’t know As you know, the last few weeks have seen two heralded Sox prospects get called up to the majors, in the form of Yoan Moncada and Reynaldo Lopez. While both started in the majors last season, their respective organizational debuts gave me a perfect excuse to:

• Use Baseball Reference’s Oracle of Baseball, and;
• Create a different type of quiz than what I’ve published thus far. (Sound off in the comments section, though, if you like/dislike!)

If you aren’t familiar with BR’s Oracle, it will attempt to link any two players in baseball history together through a shared chain of teammates. All based on the six degrees of separation theory, with the technology coming from the Oracle of Bacon.

Anyway, today’s Sporcle Saturday is actually two challenges:

1. Correctly link the chain of players from Roy Patterson, the first pitcher to ever throw a pitch for the Sox through the paths of history to Reynaldo Lopez.
2. Do the same, but from Sam Mertes, the Sox’ first second basemen, to Yoan Moncada.

Quiz Parameters

As mentioned above, these quizzes are different from the others. To wit:

• No typing necessary as all the answers are clickable and can be seen from the outset.
• This is a forced order quiz. You have to name the players in order from 1901 to 2017.
• This is a minefield quiz. One wrong click and it’s game over for you. (You can, of course, play as many times as you’d like)
• For each quiz, you’ll have three minutes to complete it.
• I’m not sure how well these quizzes will format, since there are two. As always, there are direct links to the quizzes at the bottom. Good luck!

Useless information to amaze, annoy, confound, and/or sadden your friends:

• Just one for today: according to his SABR biography, Roy Patterson is also the first pitcher to throw a pitch in the American League. All other games were rained out.

Direct link to the Reynaldo Lopez quiz

Direct link to the Yoan Moncada quiz