Baseball Opening Day Trivia
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49 free Baseball Opening Day trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Opening Day is baseball's unofficial holiday, the one day every team is in first place and half the country calls in sick. This baseball Opening Day trivia quiz covers the traditions (Cincinnati's Findlay Market Parade and its right to open at home, presidential first pitches from William Howard Taft onward), the records (Tom Seaver's 16 Opening Day starts, Walter Johnson's nine shutouts, Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Robinson's eight homers, the only Opening Day no-hitter), and the oddities: a 1907 forfeit over snowballs, a pitcher who won two openers in one year, and seasons that began in Tokyo, Sydney, Monterrey and, in 2020, late July. Questions run from easy (which team always opens at home?) to genuinely hard (which fan-favourite outfielder hit three homers off Dwight Gooden on Opening Day 1994?), so it works for a bar quiz the week the season starts, a ballpark tailgate, or settling arguments in the group chat about who threw out the first pitch when. Every answer was checked against the encyclopedia entries on Opening Day, the players and the seasons involved, and each question links to its source.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which rule change debuted on Opening Day 1973, when the Yankees' Ron Blomberg walked with the bases loaded?
The designated hitter
The designated hitter. The first DH ever to bat did not get a hit that time up, yet the bat Blomberg carried to the plate went to the Hall of Fame anyway.
Q 02What is the name of the annual parade that precedes the Reds' home opener in Cincinnati?
Findlay Market
Findlay Market. Its shopkeepers joined the Opening Day festivities as a rooters' group in 1920 and kept marching after the other groups faded; the city's pre-game parades date to the 1890s.
Q 03Which rookie, an emergency Opening Day starter in 1981, pitched a shutout that set off a craze named after him?
Fernando Valenzuela
Fernando Valenzuela. The 20-year-old got the ball only because Jerry Reuss strained a calf the day before; he blanked Houston 2–0, won his first eight starts, and Fernandomania was born.
Q 04Who was the first US president to throw out a ceremonial first pitch on Opening Day, in 1910?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft. Umpire Billy Evans handed him a new ball before the Senators' home opener, and the president made a strong throw from his box seat, then stayed for the whole game.
Q 05Which president threw Opening Day first pitches with both his right and his left arm?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman. Ambidextrous, he kept crowds guessing which arm he would use, and he was the first president to throw out a first ball left-handed.
Q 06Which president threw the ceremonial first pitch at the first game in Cleveland's Jacobs Field?
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton. In an Indians cap and warm-up jacket he threw a strike to Sandy Alomar; Cleveland then won in the 11th after Seattle's starter had held them hitless for seven innings.
Q 07Which president, a keen softball pitcher, never threw out an Opening Day first pitch while in office?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter. He never opened a season as president but did close one: his only first pitch in office came before Game 7 of the 1979 World Series.
Q 08Who threw the American League's only Opening Day no-hitter, in 1940?
Bob Feller
Bob Feller. Just 21, he beat the White Sox 1–0, and the no-hitter survived its last out only because second baseman Ray Mack dived to knock down a grounder, whirled and threw.
Q 09Which Hall of Famer holds the record for most Opening Day starts by a pitcher, with 16?
Tom Seaver
Tom Seaver. Traded away by his first club in 1977, he came back to start one more opener for them in 1983, then made his last two for the White Sox in his forties.
Q 10Which 38-year-old ace won a 15-inning 1–0 pitching duel on Opening Day 1926?
Walter Johnson
Walter Johnson. He blanked Connie Mack's Athletics for all 15 innings and won only when three straight Senators hits in the last finally got to Eddie Rommel.
Q 11Whose 714th home run, hit on Opening Day 1974, tied baseball's all-time career record?
Hank Aaron
Hank Aaron. He connected in Cincinnati with his very first swing of the season; four days later, back home in Atlanta, he hit number 715 and the record was his alone.
Q 12Which Red Sox great hit .449 across his Opening Day games, with at least one hit in all 14?
Ted Williams
Ted Williams. Even three years away on wartime service did not break the run: in his first game back, on Opening Day 1946, he homered into the centre-field bleachers in Washington.
Q 13Who hit three home runs on Opening Day 1994 for the Cubs, a National League first?
Tuffy Rhodes
Q 21Which Dodgers pitcher hit his first career home run on Opening Day 2013 and threw a shutout in the same game?
Clayton Kershaw
Clayton Kershaw. His eighth-inning homer broke a scoreless tie; the last pitcher to homer and throw a shutout on Opening Day had been Cleveland's Bob Lemon, 60 years earlier.
Q 22Which team played its first-ever game in the snow at its home opener in April 1977?
Toronto Blue Jays
Toronto Blue Jays. A Zamboni borrowed from hockey's Maple Leafs cleared the field, and first baseman Doug Ault warmed the crowd with the franchise's first two home runs.
Q 23Which pitching statistic became official on Opening Day 1969, when reliever Bill Singer was credited with the very first?
The save
Tuffy Rhodes. All three came off Dwight Gooden, yet the Cubs still lost 12–8; two years later he left for Japan, where he went on to tie the single-season home run record.
Q 14Who was the first player to hit three home runs on Opening Day, in 1988?
George Bell
George Bell. The reigning AL MVP had spent the spring feuding with his own club about losing his place in left field, then took it out on Bret Saberhagen, who gave up all three.
Q 15Which Cleveland player-manager homered in his first at-bat on Opening Day 1975, his debut as MLB's first Black manager?
Frank Robinson
Frank Robinson. He wrote his own name into the lineup, then drove a pitch from the Yankees' Doc Medich over the wall in the first inning of his first game in charge.
Q 16Which Japanese star made his MLB debut on Opening Day 2001, then won both Rookie of the Year and MVP that season?
Ichiro Suzuki
Ichiro Suzuki. Many, some of his new teammates included, doubted he would hit in the majors; two late hits won that opener, and he ended the year with a rookie-record 242.
Q 17Jackie Robinson is remembered as a second baseman, but which position did he play in his 1947 Opening Day debut?
First base
First base. Brooklyn had Eddie Stanky entrenched at second, so the rookie spent the spring learning a new position; he moved across in 1948, once Stanky had been traded.
Q 18Who hit the first home run at Yankee Stadium on its opening day, April 18, 1923?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth. His three-run homer off Howard Ehmke sank his former team, the Red Sox, 4–1, and a sportswriter soon named the new park the House That Ruth Built.
Q 19At the New York Giants' snowy 1907 home opener, what did the umpire do after fans swarmed the field and threw snowballs?
Declared a forfeit
Declared a forfeit. With almost no police inside the Polo Grounds, the lone umpire gave the home team 15 minutes to clear the field, watch in hand, then handed the Phillies a 9–0 win.
Q 20MLB pushed its 1968 openers back until the day after whose funeral?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. He was buried on April 9, and with cities in turmoil after his assassination, both leagues held their first games back until the following afternoon.
The save. Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman had devised it ten years earlier to measure how well relievers did their job; Singer earned the first with three shutout innings.
Q 24Which team's ten straight Opening Day wins from 2013 to 2022 tied the Boston Beaneaters' record?
Houston Astros
Houston Astros. The streak was started by the 2013 team that went on to lose 111 games, and it ended in 2023 with a 3–2 defeat to the White Sox.
Q 25Which team had MLB's best all-time Opening Day winning percentage (.646) through 2026?
New York Mets
New York Mets. They lost their first eight openers after joining the league in 1962, then turned into the best Opening Day team of all: 42–23 after winning their 2026 opener.
Q 26Which Hall of Famer launched a 2014 White House petition, backed by Anheuser-Busch, to make Opening Day a holiday?
Ozzie Smith
Ozzie Smith. He argued that millions already played hooky for the opener, so it was an unofficial holiday anyway; he needed 100,000 signatures in 30 days to earn a White House reply.
Q 27Which Washington Post columnist titled a 1984 book Why Time Begins on Opening Day?
Thomas Boswell
Thomas Boswell. He joined the Post as a copy aide in 1969 and never left, and along the way he invented a batting statistic of his own, total average.
Q 28Which ballpark, opened on Opening Day 1992, set off a wave of retro-style stadiums across the majors?
Camden Yards
Camden Yards. With an old brick railroad warehouse looming beyond right field in downtown Baltimore, it made new parks want to look old; Rick Sutcliffe opened it with a 2–0 shutout.
Q 29In 2000, the first MLB games ever played outside North America opened the season at which stadium?
Tokyo Dome
Tokyo Dome. Some 55,000 watched the opener, and the second game of the series was settled by Benny Agbayani's pinch-hit grand slam in the 11th inning.
Q 30Which expansion team drew more than 80,000 fans to its first home opener, then a record crowd for an opener?
Colorado Rockies
Colorado Rockies. Exactly 80,227 filled Denver's football stadium, and Eric Young sent them wild at once, leading off the home first with a home run in an 11–4 win over Montreal.