BALTIMORE—Friday night’s Orioles trivia question wasn’t a hard one: “Who was the World Series MVP in 1966?”
The answer was Frank Robinson, and asking the question wasn’t Dennis T., the team’s in-game host. It was Ken Jennings, the host of “Jeopardy!,” which begins its 43rd season on September 14th.
Jennings was at the ballpark with his son Dylan as part of a stadium tour. The two aim to see games in all 30 major league stadiums, and they’re nearly halfway to their goal.
The 52-year-old, who lives with his family in Seattle, is a devoted Mariners fan who gets to perhaps a dozen games a season, and he was making his second visit to Camden Yards. His first was in the late ’90s, but it was his son’s first.
“Unfortunately we’re a little bit lazy about it,” Jennings said while standing in front of the Orioles’ dugout during batting practice. “We were hitting one park a summer for a while, and then I did the math, and I realized I’d be pushing 80 by the time we wrapped it up.
“I’m a healthy guy, but let’s not leave it to chance, so we went to three last summer. We’ve been to four this summer.”
Among the Jennings’ favorites are Busch Stadium in St. Louis, which they visited earlier this summer, “an amazing park,” he said, and American Family Field in Milwaukee.
“We really liked Milwaukee and didn’t expect to. That’s kind of a dark horse for me,” Jennings said. “Really great vibe there.”
As he looked around the ballpark, Jennings recalled seeing a much different Camden Yards nearly 30 years ago.
“This was the first of these I went back in the ’90s, even before Seattle had a cool park like this,” Jennings said. “We all owe Camden Yards a lot of thanks. It’s an amazing park.”
As a child growing up in Washington, he watched games in a much different environment than the lovely T-Mobile Park.
“Seeing a floundering Mariners team in the Kingdome was a big part of my childhood,” he said. “Terrible team, terrible park, but it builds character.”
Jennings won a record 74 games in 2004 as a Jeopardy! contestant, a record that seems as unapproachable as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak and Cal Ripken’s 2,632 consecutive games played.
“It’s more like a DiMaggio streak,” Jennings said. “Obviously, there’s an element of the marathon to a Jeopardy! run because it does take it out of you. You see a lot of good Jeopardy! players age out of it. I was 29 when I was first on the show. I’m not as fast now, decades later. It’s not an Iron Horse, Ripken-type of situation.”
Jeopardy! tapes a week’s worth of shows in a single day and Jennings prepares by eating peanut butter on a banana.
“That’s like Wade Boggs with his chicken,” he joked. “That’s usually my Jeopardy! breakfast of champions.”
There aren’t hard and fast records of the number of Jeopardy! contestants since the show began in 1964 with Art Fleming as host. Alex Trebek started his storied run of this version of the show in 1984. That ended with his death in 2020. Jennings began hosting in 2021.
Jennings estimates that with 10,000 shows produced, the contestant pool must be nearing 20,000 not far away from 23,785 major leaguers, according to Baseball Reference.
It’s really hard to get on Jeopardy! I’ve taken the difficult online test annually for nearly a decade, and the closest I’ve gotten to the Alex Trebek stage was meeting Jennings.
“The weird thing about Jeopardy! Is you have to imagine there’s no minor leagues,” Jennings said. “You just kind of get a phone call that says: ‘You’re in the show, but you’re not actually on a minor league roster.
“You’re just an accountant somewhere, and you just have to show up in a major league park with very little orientation, a morning of orientation, and you have to face a major league pitcher.
“That’s what Jeopardy! is. These are people in their first minutes on TV, having to see how they deal with that.”
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