t h e -- c r a c k e r s How much do you know about Atlanta’s longest-running minor league baseball clubs, the Atlanta Crackers and the Atlanta Black Crackers? Take a crack at the quiz below to test your knowledge. Scoring 0-4 correct: Stri-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ike! 5-8 correct: Base Hit 9-12 correct: Stand-up Double 13-16 correct: Home Run! Questions 1. Who is known widely as “Mr. Atlanta Baseball?” 2. After fire destroyed the original wooden Crackers stadium in 1923, the team owner built a concrete-and-steel structure which opened the following year. What was the proper name of that stadium, known popularly as Ponce de Leon Ball Park? 3. Which Atlanta Crackers broadcaster and National Hall of Famer caught the attention of Dodgers owner Branch Rickey and was eventually traded for a minor-league catcher? 4. Which Crackers have been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame? 5. Who was the only African-American ever to sign with the Southern Association and, more specifically, the Atlanta Crackers? 6. What unusual feature could be found in the right centerfield of Ponce de Leon Ball Park? 7. In the longest game in Southern Association history and one of the longest in baseball, for how many innings did the Crackers play against Chattanooga? 8. Which all-time Cracker home-run leader, considered the Southern Association’s answer to Babe Ruth, once hit a 518-mile home run? 9. Who was the first African-American woman to co-own a minor-league baseball team? 10. What circumstance declared the Atlanta Black Crackers champions of the Negro League? 11. Which catcher for the 1962 Junior World Series-winning Crackers—the team’s last championship team—was eventually fielded by the St. Louis Cardinals? 12. Which Cracker, recently inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame, served as chief magistrate for Chattooga County, Georgia? 13. Which Atlanta Cracker hit the first home run out of the newly built Atlanta Stadium? 14. How many pennants did the Atlanta Crackers win over their sixty-plus-year history? 15. Name the only other organized professional baseball team to win more pennants over that same period of time. 16. Name the Georgia native who played against the Crackers in 1949 and broke Atlanta's color barrier between blacks and whites in professional sporting contests. Answers 1. Earl Mann (1904-1990), who rose from peanut vendor at Ponce de Leon Ball Park, to Crackers general manager in 1933, to president in 1935, to owner in 1949. Mann sold the team in 1959. 2. R.J. Spiller Field. 3. Ernie Harwell, traded in 1948. 4. Luke Appling, inducted in 1964; and Eddie Matthews in 1999. 5. Nat Peeples in 1954. 6. A magnolia tree. Although Poncey is long gone, the tree survives behind what is now the parking lot of the Ponce Square shopping center on Piedmont Avenue. 7. Nineteen innings. 8. Bob Montag; the ball landed in the coal car of a train passing through on the tracks above the first-base line and traveled to Nashville and back. 9. Billie Harden. She and the Reverend John Hardener, her husband, provided the team with a bus, new uniforms, and negotiated the use of Ponce de Leon Ball Park for the Atlanta Black Crackers. 10. When the champs of the Northern division, the Homestead Greys, refused to come south to play, they forfeited the series thus awarding the Black Crackers the league pennant. 11. Tim McCarver. 12. Ralph “Country” Brown. 13. Tommie Aaron, in 1965. 14. Seventeen. 15. The New York Yankees. 16. Cairo, Georgia-native Jackie Robinson, when his Brooklyn Dodgers played the white Crackers at Poncey in a three-game exhibition series in April 1949.