Answers to Trivia Questions on Baseball and the Supreme Court

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Here are the answers to last week’s trivia questions:

1. Two Justices have played baseball in the major leagues. Name them. Hints:

One Justice was Rookie of the Year, a three-time All Star, and a two-time World Series Champion.

The other has a first name that is almost identical to the middle name of a 20th-century Chief Justice.

David Justice and Evan Justice.

Among his many accomplishments in his distinguished career, David Justice was National League Rookie of the Year in 1990, was an All Star with the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians, and played for the World Series champion Braves in 1995 and the World Series champion New York Yankees in 2000.

Evan Justice pitched in nine games for the Colorado Rockies last year. He’s currently back in the minors. His first name is similar to Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’s middle name.

Please don’t complain that this was a trick question. Surely the first hint was sufficient to make clear that the answers wouldn’t be Supreme Court justices. The Rookie of the Year award came into existence only in 1947, so the pool of possible justices would be limited to those joining the Court since the late 1960s. It would be common knowledge if a recent Supreme Court justice had had a career like David Justice’s.

2. This catcher was admitted to the Supreme Court bar during his major-league career and is the only major-league player ever to be a member of the Supreme Court bar.

Muddy Ruel, whose full name was Herold Dominic Ruel. Ruel, a catcher, played for six American League teams between 1915 and 1934, including eight seasons with the Washington Senators (in three of which he received AL MVP votes). He was Walter Johnson’s favorite catcher and scored the winning run for the Senators in the 1924 World Series.

Ruel was the Yankees catcher from 1917 to 1920, including in the game in which a pitch from Yankees pitcher Carl Mays hit Indians shortstop Ray Chapman in the head, fractured his skull, and killed him.

According to this piece, Ruel received his law degree from Washington University in 1922 and was admitted to the Supreme Court bar in 1927. (His New York Times obituary says that his Supreme Court bar admission took place in 1929.). The piece, written in 2015, says that “Ruel remains the only major league player ever admitted to the High Court’s bar.” Here’s another excerpt from it about the remarkable Ruel:

Ruel’s intelligence and sophistication were widely recognized. Upon his return to Washington after his trade to the Red Sox, the fans held a day to honor him. The program for the event had on its cover a photo of him not in uniform, but in a coat and tie with a studious look on his face, and the caption, “Baseball Strategist – Lawyer – Gentleman.” In Boston, the mayor made him an honorary citizen and presented him with a volume of Longfellow’s poetry because, as [his son] Dennis Ruel noted, Muddy Ruel had the unusual habit of reading books.

Ruel loved baseball and made it his lifelong pursuit. As Dennis Ruel stated, “baseball made more sense to him than anything else in life,” and he regarded it as “the best mix of skill and fate, human talent and human error that we have ever been able to conceive.” After the brief interlude in the bank trust department, he became the pitching coach for the Chicago White Sox in 1935. He continued to surprise, revealing yet another dimension when the team was forced to train indoors, playing waltzes and classical music on the piano during an exercise session. In 1946, he became special assistant to the new commissioner of baseball, Happy Chandler.

Ruel is also credited with first referring to the catcher’s equipment as “the tools of ignorance.”

3. This catcher filed a lawsuit in which he contended that a cartoon character defamed him.

Yogi Berra (born Lorenzo Pietro Berra and also known as Lawrence Peter Berra). Berra sued Hanna-Barbera Productions for defamation of character after it introduced its cartoon character Yogi Bear in 1958, but he evidently quickly dropped his suit. Hanna-Barbera implausibly contended that it did not name Yogi Bear after Berra. The Hall of Fame Yankees catcher was famous by 1958, having already won three AL MVPs and six World Series.

Berra, who died in 2015, remains well known for his koan-like Yogi-isms.

Yogi Berra

4. List as many as you can of the major-league baseball players Justice Harry Blackmun names in his opinion in Flood v. Kuhn (1969) (holding that major-league baseball’s reserve system, which forbade players from becoming free agents, is exempt from the federal antitrust laws).

By my quick count, Blackmun names 88 players in his opinion. One is the plaintiff Curt Flood, and the other 87 come in this ridiculous sentence in Blackmun’s over-the-top encomium to baseball:

Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanella, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganss, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O’Farrell, Lefty O’Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiskey, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove.

(Cap Anson also gets one other mention.)