Your Saturday Sporcle: The 2020 Diamondbacks

You know it’s the off-season when the Saturday Sporcles show up again! And, as is probably some kind of tradition, we open with a very short-term memory quiz, inviting you to see how many of this year’s roster you remember. This will be a nice warm-up for next week, when we open the polls for the 2020 D-backs ratings. Of course, it was a weird year, and the roster churn was significant. In just 60 games, the D-backs used 20 position players and 25 pitchers (plus Carson Kelly, who did a bit of both!). That’s the same total of 45 as they used in 2019, when there was a full 162-game schedule (21 position players and 24 pitchers that year).

Especially on the pitching side, a lot of the Diamondbacks did not see significant action. Excluding Kelly, eight players threw a total of fewer than seven innings. Taijuan Walker and Joel Payamps were the only ones with such a light MLB workload in 2019. Every hitter used by Arizona this year did get at least 20 plate-appearances. This is better than 2019, when some guy called Yasmany Tomas saw only 6 PA. Guess he sucked. But overall, it felt to me like there were a lot of times when the players coming through the bullpen door seemed to be highly unfamiliar.

So, a couple of tweaks to make this one a bit easier. Firstly, it’s in alphabetical order of surname, so once you start to fill in names, you should be able to narrow down the letter with which their name starts. The final column is the number of at-bats (for position players) or plate appearances (for pitchers), which should help you figure out whether you are looking for an everyday player or a fringe name. Still, I don’t think it’ll be easy. if you get more than two-thirds (so 30 of the 45), I would say that’s a good tally. Though it perhaps helps that three surnames will count as double, and one is worth three points, due to multiple people with the same last name...

It’s embedded below, or here’s the link if you’re on mobile. Let us know how you did in the comments, and which were your most embarrassing misses...