Sports memories

Sports used to arrive on paper and over the air before they arrived as a highlight. A box score was a column of numbers you could study with coffee. A baseball game on the radio asked you to see the park yourself.

A heavyweight fight might occupy the neighbors for a week, because there were not a dozen other fights asking for the same attention. A golf tournament became a television habit. A horse race stayed tied to a weekend on the calendar. The questions on this page belong to that era of durable names, the kind a person can still place without looking up this year's standings.

That last point is a promise. A batting mark from 1941 is safe to print and leave alone. This season's division table is not, and it would turn the page into a chore. If a fact could be out of date by autumn, it did not become a question. You will not be asked who leads a league today. You will be asked for nicknames, host cities, and afternoons that stayed famous because they were unusual.

Baseball was called the national pastime for so long that the phrase became a cliché and remained accurate anyway. The first night game in the major leagues was played in Cincinnati in 1935, which tells you how much of the older game was a daytime job. Radio filled the gap for anyone who could not be in the seats. Later, television moved the same games into the living room, which is why this category sits comfortably beside the television quiz even though the questions are about the field, not the camera.

The notes add a city, a date, or a reason the event mattered outside the stadium. You can miss the answer and still leave with the good part. American history holds the wars and public arguments that framed some of these seasons. Classic television is where a lot of the games eventually sat down.