BALTIMORE-Ken Jennings turned a Friday night at Camden Yards into a trivia stop, and the question he asked was an easy one: “Who was the World Series MVP in 1966?”
The answer, of course, was Frank Robinson. And the man behind the question was the “Jeopardy!” host himself, who is set to begin the show’s 43 rd season on September 14 th.
Jennings was at the ballpark with his son Dylan as part of a tour built around a simple goal: see games in all 30 major league stadiums. They’re nearly halfway there.
The 52-year-old Seattle resident, who said he gets to about a dozen Mariners games a season, was making just his second trip to Camden Yards. His first came in the late ’90s, and Friday was Dylan’s first look at the park.
“Unfortunately we’re a little bit lazy about it,” Jennings said while standing in front of the Orioles’ dugout during batting practice. “We were hitting one park a summer for a while, and then I did the math, and I realized I’d be pushing 80 by the time we wrapped it up.
“I’m a healthy guy, but let’s not leave it to chance, so we went to three last summer. We’ve been to four this summer.”
Jennings said two of the parks that stood out most were Busch Stadium in St. Louis, which he and Dylan visited earlier this summer, and American Family Field in Milwaukee.
“We really liked Milwaukee and didn’t expect to. That’s kind of a dark horse for me,” Jennings said. “Really great vibe there.”
Camden Yards, though, still left its mark on him. Looking around the stadium, he said the ballpark felt different from the one he saw nearly 30 years ago, but the impression remained the same.
“This was the first of these I went back in the ’90s, even before Seattle had a cool park like this,” Jennings said. “We all owe Camden Yards a lot of thanks. It’s an amazing park.”
He also reflected on the baseball environment he grew up with in Washington, where the Kingdome shaped his childhood as a Mariners fan.
“Seeing a floundering Mariners team in the Kingdome was a big part of my childhood,” he said. “Terrible team, terrible park, but it builds character.”
Jennings’ place in “Jeopardy!” history is already secure. He won a record 74 games in 2004, a run he compared to the sort of streak that belongs in the realm of Joe DiMaggio more than Cal Ripken.
“It’s more like a DiMaggio streak,” Jennings said. “Obviously, there’s an element of the marathon to a Jeopardy!
run because it does take it out of you. You see a lot of good Jeopardy!
players age out of it. I was 29 when I was first on the show.
I’m not as fast now, decades later. It’s not an Iron Horse, Ripken-type of situation.”
The show’s pace is part of the challenge. “Jeopardy!” tapes a week’s worth of episodes in one day, and Jennings said his preparation is as simple as peanut butter on a banana.
“That’s like Wade Boggs with his chicken,” he joked. “That’s usually my Jeopardy! breakfast of champions.”
There’s no clean way to count every contestant in the show’s long run. “Jeopardy!”
began in 1964 with Art Fleming as host, Alex Trebek took over the version most viewers know in 1984, and Jennings became the host in 2021 after Trebek’s death in 2020. Jennings estimated that with 10,000 shows produced, the contestant pool is probably approaching 20,000.
That still leaves the comparison to baseball’s player pool, which Baseball Reference puts at 23,785 major leaguers.
Jennings said the hardest part of getting on the show is the jump itself.
“The weird thing about Jeopardy! Is you have to imagine there’s no minor leagues,” Jennings said. “You just kind of get a phone call that says: ‘You’re in the show, but you’re not actually on a minor league roster.
“You’re just an accountant somewhere, and you just have to show up in a major league park with very little orientation, a morning of orientation, and you have to face a major league pitcher.
“That’s what Jeopardy! is. These are people in their first minutes on TV, having to see how they deal with that.”
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