Oh yeah, the Wrigley connection. Damn totally missed that. Good trivia question since you could figure it out by that even if you didn't know.

lol @ that being the baseball history question they came up with. I'm guessing no one on the show got it. I've never even heard of that island before.

wtf is with all these people who have never heard of catalina island?

- an englishman who has never been to california

ps. i had no idea who owned it

I am a big baseball history nerd and was completely clueless on this question. Guessed Brooklyn Dodgers.

I guessed the Cubs simply because the media has been sucking them off for all of 2008, so I just figured Jeopardy was getting on the daisy chain.

Like many others on this thread, I also guessed the Dodgers. I guess we just connect Dodgers, California and them not always being there.

Rangers and Mariners were the first two teams that popped into my head (geographical proximity to Cali, been around at least 30 years). I went with the Mariners.

I guessed the Seattle Mariners.

I guessed Cubs and got it right...but I was very close to guessing the Yankees.

How on earth can you guess Rangers or Mariners?
The Mariners have only been in existence for 31 years or something (didn't they start in 77?) and the Rangers moved there from Washington in 71 I believe. Thus the Mariners would have been training NOT in Arizona ending last year or something like that.

Anyway, I really know my spring training stuff, for the most part, because I spent 6 years watching spring training games in Florida, reading up on it, and travelling all around those spring training facilities during their minor league season.

So I had a significant advantage in being able to mostly eliminate a lot of teams whose spring training history I'm pretty familiar with (Tigers have trained in Lakeland since 37, Phillies have trained in Clearwater for a really long time, etc etc). And I still almost got this one wrong.
I blanked on the Yankees momentarily because I just wasn't quite sure of their spring training history before Ft. Lauderdale (they moved from FtL to their new Tampa facility in 96). But now that I'm remembering some video of Babe Ruth in Florida in the 30's so that took them out of contention.

It was a matter of guessing between teams from pre-1958 and I didn't have much historical knowledge of the Cubs EVER training in Florida like pretty much every other team at the time did.

I don't know how any Dodgers fan could even partway consider them. They made a pretty big deal about the Dodgers last spring training at Vero Beach, FL this past March. It was their 60th year there. And even before they said whatever they did this year I thought pretty much every Dodger fan in existence knew that they had been training in Florida close to forever (much to annoyance of the Los Angeles fans who would prefer they train a bit closer to home obviously).

Yeah, that one is super-easy for me because I worked for the Dodgers in Vero Beach for 5 years. But any time some player from Southern California would come there for the first time they would comment on how neat it was because they had watched all those spring training games from Vero Beach as a kid but had never seen it in real life.

So this is the same location as the 'older' Wrigley Field in Los Angeles?
Didn't the Los Angeles Angels play a season or two there before moving to Anaheim? I know there was a field there called Wrigley but I didn't know it was the same ownership. Would have thought it was just a coincidence or something (like old Bush Stadium in Indianapolis not being at all related to Busch Stadium in St. Louis for example).

Pretty sure LA's Wringley is also where they filmed the old Home-Run Derby shows with Mark Scott that would feature sluggers like Hank Aaron taking on Mickey Mantle, etc.

FJ! usually isn't quite that easy, even in sports, but it's usually more sports related than this one (which required you to know the Wrigley/Catalina connection).

Here are some other Final Jeopardy clues that were in some way baseball related (Listed with episode #, airdate, category in all-caps, then clue):

#5452, aired 2008-04-29 BASEBALL TERMS: Hall of Famer Willie Stargell called it "a butterfly with hiccups"
#5434, aired 2008-04-03 SPORTS FIRSTS: The first baseball World Series game played outside the U.S. was played in this city in 1992
#5176, aired 2007-02-26 AMERICANA: In a February 22, 1936 reenactment, retired star pitcher Walter Johnson threw this across the Rappahannock
#4738, aired 2005-03-23 MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL: The team names of these 2 expansion clubs start with the same 3 letters; one might catch the other
#4693, aired 2005-01-19 CLASSIC AMERICAN SONGS: The introductory verse to this 1908 song begins, "Katie Casey was baseball mad"
#4366, aired 2003-09-08 TOYS & GAMES: 12-year-old David Mullany gave this toy its name, a euphemism for striking out in baseball
#3841, aired 2001-04-23 BASEBALL HALL OF FAMERS: A Red Sox pitcher, later a Yankee, he held the World Series record for consecutive scoreless innings from 1918 to 1961
#3635, aired 2000-05-26 BASEBALL HISTORY: Current name of the National League team that started out in the 1870s as the Boston Red Stockings
#3386, aired 1999-05-03 ORGANIZATIONS: In 1901 Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, D.C., Baltimore & Philadelphia made up this; Tampa Bay joined in 1998
#3275, aired 1998-11-27 BASEBALL TEAMS: In the early days, this baseball team was known as the Alleghenies
#3164, aired 1998-05-07 SPORTS TEAMS: 1 of 2 names shared by both a Major League Baseball team & an NFL team
#2823, aired 1996-12-04 BASEBALL: The best American League lefthanded pitcher 1916-18, he was moved to left field in 1919

damn, i missed 2 of those questions, i love Jeopardy with sports questions

Okay, it's not the same Wrigley Field the Angels played in. Although the old Los Angels Angels minor league teams of the 20's and 30's did play there. But I was thinking of the current Angels big league team who also played at Wrigley Field for 1 season.

The Cubs training site in Catalina was ALSO known as Wrigley Field though even though it wasn't the same field. Weird.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrigley_Field_(Los_Angeles)

Missed zero of them.

I missed 2 out of the 12 as well.

Should have known the freaking Atlanta Braves one. Damn.
Didn't know the silver dollar thing because I suck at American history (kind of).

What are you doing on a message board, you should be trying out for game shows!!!

I had no clue so I peeked. My odds were roughly one in 20 or so of getting it right. I am however familiar with the island.

superuber - Getting all of those correct is pretty impressive. A couple not-so-easy ones in there.

Is it only 1 in 20 because you are smart enough to eliminate teams that have been in existence for roughly 30 years or less including the Mariners?
If so then you were doing better than a couple of the people in here who approached it solely on geography but didn't think of eliminating them based on the time element.

Right. It had to be a team that's been around for a long time and has history. If I think even harder I could probably narrow it down to just a handful of non-California storied franchises. Like, it's probably not going to be the Atlanta Braves because I don't think it would make an interesting enough FJ question if it was.

The Wrigley family sure had some bank. I can see from my window a palace up on a hill they used to live in called the Wrigley Mansion. Now it hosts events. It's a big-ass house perched on top of a hill so they get 360 degree views of Phoenix.

The only one I missed was the whiffleball (couldn't put whiff together with ball) and silver dollar. Almost all of those are significantly easier than the spring training question, I mean, come on, not one but two Babe Ruth questions which reference his changing positions and teams? That's like making Shakespeare the default answer to questions about English playwrights.

Dodgers is a pretty bad guess imo, since they wouldn't try to mislead you, by saying "Non-california" team. I didn't get it and I would have bet everything once I saw the title.

Read the question again. It said "nearly 30 years". Of course the Mariners qualify.

They only qualify if you remove common sense from the equation. Spring training has been concentrated in Florida and Arizona for a very long time so there's no way the Mariners would be an option.

White Sox?

By the way, would anyone be interested in other sports related FJ! clues? I could post some for other sports like I did with baseball. Either here, or in a new thread, whichever you think would be better...