Baseball trivia quiz

How to play the MLB quiz

Choose Play the quiz for ten random questions from the 50 above. Each question has four options in shuffled order. Tap your answer and you see at once whether you got it, along with a line of background. After ten questions you get your score and a list of the ones you missed; “Play again” deals ten new questions. Your best score is saved on your own device.

The topic menu narrows the quiz to Records, World Series, Rules and terms, or Teams and history. Question list puts all the baseball trivia on one page with hidden answers, for hosts and teachers.

How to run a baseball trivia night

A nine-inning format fits baseball trivia nicely and takes about an hour:

1. Nine innings of three questions – three outs, three questions. Mix the topics so each inning has one easy question from Rules and terms.
2. Scoring: each correct answer is a run. A team that gets all three in an inning earns a bonus run, like a big inning.
3. Seventh-inning stretch: stop for marking and read the answers with the explanations.
4. Extra innings if teams are tied after nine: one numeric question each round, such as Pete Rose’s career hits (4,256). Closest wins; if it is still tied, play another.

For a classroom, use the Rules and terms group as a warm-up and let students vote on the World Series questions in small groups.

Worked example: the box score

Nine innings of three questions is 27 questions, so the maximum is 27 runs plus 9 bonus runs, or 36. A team that answers 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 3, 2 across the nine innings scores 19 runs, plus 3 bonus runs for the three perfect innings, for a final of 22. If the other team also has 22, the extra-inning question decides it: a guess of 4,200 hits (56 away) beats a guess of 4,000 (256 away).

How the questions were chosen

Baseball has a deep record book, and we used it carefully:

• Records with a year attached – Ruth’s 60 in 1927, Maris’s 61 in 1961, Ichiro’s 262 hits in 2004, Ohtani’s 50 home runs and 50 steals in 2024.
• Career records held by retired players, such as Rickey Henderson’s 1,406 stolen bases and Mariano Rivera’s 652 saves.
• World Series moments that every fan has seen replayed: Mazeroski, Gibson, Carter, Mr. October.
• Rules from the Official Baseball Rules: nine innings, 90-foot bases, 60 feet 6 inches to the rubber, the universal DH from 2022 and the pitch clock from 2023.

We skipped current rosters, active players’ career totals and team title counts, since the current postseason could change them. Wrong options are real players, teams and numbers from the same era.

How we tested

The quiz runs on one small engine, and we wrote automated Node tests for it (tests/quiz.test.js) and ran them before publishing. They read the question list straight from this page's source and check that:

• all 50 questions have a unique id and no question appears twice;
• every question has exactly four different options, and the correct answer is one of them;
• a round always contains 10 different questions, and a second round avoids the questions from the first while enough are left;
• after the options are shuffled, the engine still knows which button is right: in 600 test rounds (6,000 shuffled questions) per quiz the correct answer landed in each of the four positions about a quarter of the time, and was always the one marked correct;
• the score counts only right answers (all right gives 10/10, all wrong gives 0/10, and answering the same question twice is ignored).

Facts were checked separately. Every question rests on well-documented baseball history. The exact numbers we were least sure of were checked against web sources (Wikipedia and news coverage) before we kept them: Rickey Henderson’s 130 steals in 1982 and 1,406 career steals, Ichiro’s 262 hits in 2004 against George Sisler’s 257, Cal Ripken Jr.’s 2,632 straight games, Derek Jeter’s 3,465 hits and Mariano Rivera’s 652 saves.

Every question was then reviewed a second time in a separate fact-check pass, and the details we doubted were checked against Wikipedia and news reports. That pass dated the Mazeroski note to the 2025 season and corrected the “Mr. October” question: Thurman Munson coined the nickname earlier in the 1977 World Series, and the Game 6 home runs made it stick.

Those are the only tests we ran: we have not tried the quiz with groups of players or on a range of phones, so if something looks wrong, please tell us.