Oakland A’s trivia: Oakland All-Stars

The 2020 MLB season is on the way, but we’ve still got over a week to wait for Opening Day. In the meantime, let’s play some trivia!

The MLB All-Star Game would have been this week if the season hadn’t been cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, with Opening Day itself still yet to come. In fact, there won’t be an All-Star Game at all this year, as it was officially canceled two weeks ago.

In commemoration of the 2020 All-Star Game that will never be, let’s take a look back at the Oakland A’s history in the Midsummer Classic. Sure, the whole process can be a bit of a popularity contest, with a long list of undeserving picks and clear snubs, and it’s entirely based on the first halves of seasons rather than their entirety. But it’s still fun to see who gets picked, and we inevitably end up using it as one measure of quality. It’s one of those labels that sticks on a player’s profile forever, in a good way.

Since moving to Oakland in 1968, the A’s have earned 120 All-Star berths in 52 seasons. Those spots have gone to 65 different players, with some of them repeating many times. There’s at least one for every year, with the most being seven in 1975. Only once has an A’s player ever won the game’s MVP award, in 1988 (no spoilers, but it was the catcher from that year).

The game itself dates back to 1933, with many more names from the Philadelphia and Kansas City days, but the Oakland list is long enough without adding another 50 mostly obscure old-timers. Among the pre-Oakland highlights are Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, and Roger Maris, plus five-time outfielder Bob Johnson and four-time catcher Frank Hayes, and their lone rep in 1966 and ‘67 shows up again on the Oakland list in ‘70. In the 1930s there was a third baseman named Pinky Higgins, and in the 1950s there was a relatively light-hitting, defensive-minded first baseman ironically named Vic Power.

The question today is, how many of the Oakland A’s All-Stars can you name? They’re listed by year, with their positions given as an extra hint. I have constructed a quiz on the website Sporcle to test your knowledge, with the following instructions:

• You can go in any order, with 20 minutes and unlimited guesses to fill 120 spaces.
• You only need to type the last names to register the answers.
• However, you do have to spell them right!
• 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?