I’ve never understood why, but I fell in love with sports when I was a boy. Maybe it was the whole essence of competition, strength going against strength. I found myself turning almost anything into a contest and picking a winning side.

But even more interesting to me than the sports themselves was the trivia that surrounded them. I loved – and still love – all manner of statistics, which is one reason I’ve loved baseball so much. Everything in baseball is a mathematical formula, from batting averages to ERAs, and I’ve spent countless tracking those numbers and comparing them against historical averages. Oddly, I’m not that great at math, but I’ll make an exception when it comes to sports statistics.

My favorite baseball game (other than the real thing) was Statis Pro Baseball, which compiled real statistics from previous seasons and distilled them into numbers on cards that were part of a board game. I don’t know how many hours I spent playing that game, but I’d imagine it was in the hundreds. The only other game that rivaled it in terms of raw time consumption was Trivial Pursuit. Again, I was captivated by the absorption of facts, just as long as they weren’t too meaningful. The challenge has been to channel this passion for statistics and trivia into a greater thirst for knowledge. It’s one thing to win at a party game. It’s another thing entirely to use that skill to improve my value and find a way to use seemingly useless trivia to my advantage.

Anyone want to play a game of Trivial Pursuit?