Oakland A’s trivia: Most career starts

The 2020 MLB season is on hiatus, and there’s no telling when baseball might start again. In the meantime, let’s play some trivia!

Over the last week, we celebrated the anniversaries of four A’s no-hitters in a span of six days, including Chief Bender of the Philadelphia A’s on Tuesday. Lots of great starting pitchers have come through the A’s organization over the years, including several Hall of Famers and many more Hall of Very Gooders, and it’s always fun looking back at their accomplishments.

So, let’s keep talking about A’s starters, specifically the ones who actually started the most for the team. If you take it back to the Philadelphia days, then you get Hall of Famers Eddie Plank, Chief Bender, Lefty Grove, and Rube Waddell, plus Rube Walberg, Eddie Rommel, Alex Kellner, and Jack Coombs, all included in the top 15. If the Kansas City days were included in the quiz below, then the runner-up would pass the leader, but overall he would still finish second in franchise history behind Plank.

The question today is, how many of Oakland’s top 30 career leaders in starts can you name? We’re just looking at Oakland history, so everyone begins in 1968, even if they played for the Kansas City A’s before that. I have constructed a quiz on the website Sporcle to test your knowledge, with the following instructions:

• Oakland years only, from 1968-2019
• You can go in any order, with 10 minutes and unlimited guesses to fill 30 spaces.
• You only need to type the last names to register the answers.
• However, you do have to spell them right!
• As an extra hint, I’ve included the year that each player debuted with Oakland (but of course not all the starts came in that year)
• Read the next paragraph about how to not spoil the answers for everyone else in the comments section.

Share your results in the comments, BUT DON’T SPOIL ANYTHING!! There is an option in the comments for ”spoiler text,” which will black out that particular text until the reader puts their mouse over it to reveal it. If you are going to share right/wrong answers, please use the spoiler option. It’s on the row of options like bold, italics, etc., all the way on the right side, in between the option to add a hyperlink and the option to add a smiley face; it looks like a black square.

DON’T BE THAT PERSON WHO SPOILS THE ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS.

Alrighty, here is the quiz! It’s embedded below, or you can click here to play it on Sporcle’s site.

How did you do? Are there any that you can’t believe you missed?