We’ve all heard them: the kind of sports trivia that means nothing to the world, like the baseball player with the highest batting average of his career at Wednesday night games. Or statistics on whether or not a golfer will score a better round while wearing red. We all have that one friend who keeps track of these nonsensical facts and uses them to impress people. However, the following facts will surely not only impress your friends but also leave them stumped and wanting to find out more on their own.
Coors Field, the stadium where the Colorado Rockies play their home games, is built at the highest elevation in Major League Baseball at 5,183 feet above sea level. Amazingly, at around 1500 feet in elevation, the next highest ballpark in the league is Chase Field in Phoenix, AZ, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Phoenix is located in a valley and does not have a high elevation, but it just so happens that most other MLB stadiums are built next to a large body of water.
The Arizona Cardinals, aside from being one of the worst divisions in football in the NFC West, weren’t always in a Western Division. Even after moving to Arizona in 1970, the Cardinals remained a part of the NFC East division for 32 years. They are the farthest Western team to be part of an Eastern Division in professional sports history.
The opposite is true for the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings and Columbus Blue Jackets. Detroit is located in eastern Michigan, just across Lake Erie, just like Pennsylvania and New York, but the Red Wings are still in the Western Conference. The same goes for the Blue Jackets. In fact, Detroit and Columbus are farther east than cities like Chicago, Indianapolis, and even parts of Florida.
There are always fun facts that you can discover on your own if you are willing to do a little research. These facts won’t make you any new friends, and they certainly won’t get you any dates. But the purpose of laying out these facts is solely to expand your knowledge of the wild and crazy world of sports and to prove that anyone, if they put their minds to it, can discover interesting and unique facts about the sports they love.