How to play

The Card

The back of a baseball card with the front torn off.

The card

Eight career totals and nothing else — no name, no team, no era, no photograph. Guess any hitter in the list and their own totals are laid beside the mystery player’s, column by column, coloured by how close they came and arrowed toward where the answer lies.

  • G — games. Green within 50, amber within 185.
  • H — hits. Green within 55, amber within 220.
  • HR — home runs. Green within 15, amber within 60.
  • RBI — runs batted in. Green within 40, amber within 165.
  • BB — walks. Green within 30, amber within 120.
  • SO — strikeouts. Green within 50, amber within 200.
  • SB — stolen bases. Green within 10, amber within 45.
  • AVG — batting average. Green within 0.003, amber within 0.010.

After 4 misses the card gives up its signature: the one column on which this career is least like every other career in the pool. Rickey Henderson’s is stolen bases, at the very top of it.

Who can come up

The list holds 3,022 hitters from 1974–2024. 500 of them can be the mystery player: the 500 longest careers, each of at least 4,000 plate appearances.

There is a second condition, and it is the one that keeps the game honest. Career totals computed from a window of seasons are only career totals for somebody whose whole career fits inside the window, so a player whose first season on file is 1974 may have debuted before it. Those players stay guessable, their row is marked with an asterisk, and they can never be the answer.

There is no editorial pool here and no recognition ranking, unlike golf or soccer. Every plate appearance of every game is on file, so how long somebody played is a column rather than a judgement call.

Where the numbers come from

Every total is counted from Retrosheet play-by-play, one plate appearance at a time. A game is only counted once the replay of it reaches the same final score that Retrosheet’s separately compiled game log records, which 99.91% of the 113,256 games on file do.

Games, at-bats, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, walks, strikeouts and stolen bases are exact. Runs and runs batted in are reconstructed rather than read off, because both depend on rebuilding where every runner was, and part of the runs-batted-in rule turns on the official scorer’s judgement about an error. On a twenty-year career they land within a handful of the published figure; nothing in the game turns on the difference, since the bands are far wider than it.

How you win

8 guesses. Fewer guesses scores higher.

Your first guess
Pick a long career you can picture, not a great one.A superstar is an outlier on four columns at once, so almost every cell comes back grey. A twelve-year regular sits near the middle of the pool and splits it.
Strikeouts point up and walks point down
Look at the modern era, and at a slugger.Strikeout rates have climbed for forty years, so the two columns together date a career almost as precisely as a debut year would — which is the fact the game withholds.
Stolen bases come back green at a low number
Stop using them and work the other seven.Most careers in the pool have almost no steals, so a green there is the least informative cell on the board. A green on steals at two hundred is the most informative.
You have hits and home runs boxed in
Use batting average to separate the volume from the rate.Two thousand hits at .250 and two thousand hits at .310 are different players in different roles, and average is the only column that tells them apart.

Nothing about the player's identity is on the card until the run ends: no position, no era, no handedness. The numbers are the only clue, which is the whole point of the back of a card.

Scoring

Naming them first guess is a hundred; each further guess is worth less, and running out scores nothing. The shared leaderboard shows it as a percentage, on the same scale as every other guessing game here.

One card a day, the same one for everybody. Unlimited deals another whenever you want more.

Golfle is an independent game platform and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Major League Baseball, any club, or the MLBPA. Club and player names are used for identification and factual game context. Play-by-play data is used by permission of Retrosheet.