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Comment by mitthrowaway2 | Hacker News Reader

If they spoke perfect English and grew up in the US, why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball?

This sounds like it can't have been true, or at least, can't have been common practice, because the false positive rate would be way too high for shooting a person.

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Baseball was called the national pastime for a reason. Back in the day it was the sport in America. It had a degree of cultural ubiquity that’s hard to understand for us today. Also I assume the questions weren’t about the basic rules of the game but more along the lines of what was going on in the season at the time. The American soldiers would have had up to date news while the Germans would presumably not.

Nah, this is definitely one of those just-so stories that’s too cute to be true. Like it sounds like the person who came up with it started with the idea of using American cultural stuff to tell soldiers apart (which maybe happened in some form at some point) and then worked backwards to try and justify why it would be a common practice with a harsh penalty (German officers who spoke perfect english because they… actually were American… but didn’t follow baseball?)

Edit: It reminds me of my favorite definitely fake boomer story: That people used to call out speedtraps on the highway by pulling over and standing in a salute… because cops can compel you not to alert people of a speedtrap… but they can’t compel you to not salute… because that would violate the first amendment? Before the internet dudes used to just sit around telling each other stories like this.

To be knowledgeable about baseball is hard to fake. Like the GP said, I'd have been shot. I might know some names of players, and I might even get some of their positions correct. If you ask me about ERAs, RBIs, batting averages, I wouldn't have a clue. I might know a large number of teams, but I doubt I know all of them. I absolutely couldn't tell you which ones were in the NL and which were AL, nor what the differences are--something about designated hitters or not.

Also, they could just have them count three strikes using their fingers

So it's perfectly reasonable that a person of German ancestry would just not care about American sports.

I'm not saying it wouldn't detect spies, but a test is no good if it also results in summary executions of one in every five apple-pie Americans.

When you're fighting for your life, yes it would be acceptable, and yes it happened.

There's no evidence people were summarily executed for bad answers. People were detained through this method though

Operation Greif

What was described above is someone asking another person a factoid about baseball and then shooting them if given an incorrect answer.

You're referring to instances of captured spies (potentially captured by said baseball questions) being tried as spies and executed.

The former did not happen, the latter did happen (which I don't think anyone here would've disputed).

Historically, these kinds of questions were kept relatively simple, like how many bases are there, how many strikes, how many balls, how many innings, what's the name of the referee (answer: umpire), etc. They're also a product of a different time when baseball was much more popular in the US among US youth, with a much stronger youth monoculture, where the only way you didn't play baseball as a kid would be if you were a loner or in a wheelchair, neither of which were consistent with becoming an officer 80-90 years ago.

Wouldn't that also apply to the spies, if they grew up in the US?

It would seem like a German who spoke perfect American English bc they had grown up here would be able to answer these basic facts

>how many bases are there, how many strikes, how many balls, how many innings, what's the name of the referee (answer: umpire), et

What percentage of Germans who grew up in the US and speak perfect American English can't answer those basic questions correctly?

While it might not be widespread there were stories of it happening, and one alleged story of an American being held(but not harmed) because of his lack of knowledge.

A better one I heard is asking about the second verse of the national anthem. The enemies studied it to know it, but ask your average GI(or most americans) what the 2nd or 3rd verse is, lol.... that's a good trick.

Okay, every other commenter here is talking about how baseball is the national pastime. And, I think you understand that.

I'll rephrase the question a bit here: How could any idiot white male raised in the US in the last 120 years possibly not know about baseball?

What I think was happening was that the US GIs would ask the infiltrating German about current baseball. Not Ty Cobb stuff, but Ted Williams stuff.

Also, for the non-baseball fans here, you have to remember that there were only 16 (28) teams back then [0], essentially no trading of players, and no interleague play. So for your team, you really had to know the core 8 players and a few pitchers. Adding in the other 7 teams gets you to ~80 or so (maximum) and they would reappear on the exact same teams year after year. And there really wasn't any other sports worth mentioning in 1943 [1]. Cognitively, it's a lot less than today.

Also, the Germans wouldn't have access to the information about the 'current-ish' state of the game. It was mostly in newspapers back then, and with the war, getting information from the sports pages out of St. Louis wasn't happening.

Same as it ever was, sports is the lingua franca of the US.

[0] 8 in MLB-NL and 8 in MLB-AL, 6 in NL-NL and 6 in NL-AL (yes, the Negro leagues are the major league, but black GIs weren't on the front lines where Germans would be infiltrating (yes, it's more complicated than this simple comment))

[1] The NFL was pretty nascent still.

To add to everything you said, another way to think about the importance of baseball at that time is to imagine that all the time kids now spend on Minecraft, TikTok, Pokemon, Twitch, and YouTube was instead directed at just one thing, and that one thing was baseball.

I would guess it would have to be a question of false confidence, akin to: 'What do you think of the cardinals win last night' when in fact there was not even a game. Obviously not sure if thats enough to shoot someone, but you may detect someone that is bullshitting quite well.

The first time I met my Bride's siblings, I was doing everything in my power to fit in. I noticed her brother was wearing a Miami Dolphins hat. Made the comment - is that your favorite baseball team? Her brothers were horrified. Her sisters were thrilled that I did not know either baseball or football.

I'd get shot for getting that one wrong, too.

I was once invited to a Super Bowl party, and I thought sure, I'll come. So I went, and watched the game for a bit on the big TV. I was asked, which team are you rooting for? I answered "the ones in the red shirts".

That didn't go over well.

> why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball?

Because their knowledge of teams and scores and wins and players would be 4 years out of date.

Amazing how nobody can imagine a world before the internet and satellite television.

Following American baseball news from Germany in detail would be virtually impossible in the 1940s.

They did have radio back then, and the American soldiers in Germany must have been following it pretty closely from Germany to be using this interrogation method.

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