Knocking Upon Your Door Trivia Quiz

Answer: Pete Rose

Depending on the source, Cobb is credited with either 4,189 hits or 4,191; Major League Baseball recognizes Cobb with 4,191 hits. Pete Rose hit a single on September 11, 1985 against the San Diego Padres for his 4,192nd career hit, thus breaking the all-time record. Rose was 44 years old at the time, and played one more season before retiring with 4,256 career hits.

Answer: Ichiro Suzuki

Ichiro led the American League in 2004 with a .372 batting average, which was the highest average for a single season of his MLB career. He had the advantage of a 162-game season, whereas in Sisler's time, the season only lasted 154 games. It wasn't until 1961 in the AL, and 1962 in the NL, that teams played 162. Ichiro had 251 hits after 154 games, but he was able to collect 11 additional hits in the remaining eight games.

Answer: Jimmy Rollins

Jimmy Rollins played 15 seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies from 2000-2014, and had a very good career which included three All-Star selections, four Gold Glove Awards, a Silver Slugger Award, and a National League MVP in 2007, the year he broke Wilson's record. That year was Rollins' best season at the plate, as he led the league with 139 runs scored and 20 triples.

It was also his career best in slugging percentage (.531).

Answer: Stan Musial

Total bases are amount of bases accrued by a player -- for example, a single is worth one base; a double is worth two bases; a triple is worth three bases, and a home run is worth four bases. Over the course of his career, Aaron amassed 6,856 total bases. Considering that each base is 90 feet apart, Aaron travelled more than 12 more miles around the bases than Musial did.

Answer: Barry Bonds

Barry Bonds began his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1986, and he won two NL MVP awards in 1990 and 1992 before joining the San Francisco Giants in 1993 when he won the MVP for the third time. After the 1999 season, the 35 year old Bonds had 445 career home runs, which was more than 300 home runs short of Aaron's record. Likely with the help of performance-enhancing drugs, Bonds was able to hit 317 home runs during the next eight seasons, including a record 73 homers in 2001. Bonds connected for his record-breaking 756th home run on August 7, 2007 in San Francisco off Washington Nationals pitcher, Mike Bacsik. Bonds finished his career with 762 home runs.

Answer: Rickey Henderson

Henderson had a remarkable career that spanned 25 seasons from 1979-2003. He is a member of the 3,000 hit club, and was the first player ever to reach 1,000 stolen bases, finishing with a staggering 1,406. He surpassed Cobb's record for runs scored on October 4, 2001 as a member of the San Diego Padres, one of the nine teams he played for during his career.

Henderson retired with 2,295 runs scored.

Answer: Lou Gehrig

It's a bit ironic that as durable as Lou Gehrig was throughout his 17 year career with the New York Yankees (1923-39), that he would die at the tender age of 37 after contracting Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a rare neurodegenerative disease that became commonly known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease" after he was diagnosed with it in his final season with the Yankees.

Gehrig's record was thought by many to be an unbreakable record since no one came within 800 games of breaking it until Cal Ripken came along. Ripken began his career in 1981, and surpassed the record on September 6, 1995 in Camden Yards in Baltimore. He would go on to extend his record to 2,632 games, which ended on September 20, 1998.

Answer: Albert Pujols

Albert Pujols played 22 seasons in the majors from 2001-2022, and retired in the top five in many major statistics, including runs batted in (2nd), total bases (2nd), home runs (4th), doubles (5th), and hits (10th), but along with the good came the bad. Due to his great bat speed and slow base running, Pujols had the perfect combination prone to hitting into double plays.

In Pujols' defense, it takes many, many years to break this sort of record, so merely being good enough to have that amount of chances to break this unwanted record is perhaps somewhat of a silver lining.

Answer: Mark Reynolds

Mark Reynolds played from 2007-2019, and was a competent home run hitter early in his career with the Arizona Diamondbacks. He averaged 35 home runs per season from 2008-2011 which put him in elite company. The problem with that is that he hit .231 and averaged 208 strikeouts during that same timeframe, which is not good by any MLB standard. Reynolds broke Philadelphia Phillies' Ryan Howard's record of 199 strikeouts set the previous season (2007) when he finished with 204 strikeouts.

He would surpass his own record two more times (223 in 2009, and 211 in 2010). Reynolds struck out 1,927 times in 5,432 at bats, more than 35 percent of the time.

Answer: Aaron Judge

When Roger Maris broke Ruth's record in 1961, no one had hit 60 home runs in a season until 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa each eclipsed it, finishing with 70 and 66 respectively. The very next year, they both surpassed 61 again. Two years later, Sosa hit 64 home runs while Barry Bonds broke McGwire's record when he hit 73 homers. All three of these players were National Leaguers, so Maris' American League record was not in jeopardy -- not until 2022 when New York Yankee, Aaron Judge deposited 62 home runs over the wall through the course of the season. Coincidentally, Judge broke Maris' record of 61 home runs hit in the 1961 season 61 years later.