Win a Free Copy of THT 2016!

by Paul Swydan

November 24, 2015

Have you heard? The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2016 is now available for sale. You can check out the table of contents and read some excerpts from the book. When you finish that you can purchase it from our independent publishing platform, Createspace, in print form, or from Amazon in print form (the Kindle version should be available later this week).

But wait, there’s more! Because we’re giving folk, and since it’s the beginning of the holiday season and all, we want to give you a chance to win yourself a free copy of the book. So today and tomorrow (and yesterday), we’ll be running a trivia contest based on one of the articles in the book. The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will win a free physical copy of the book (sorry, no free Kindle version). It’s just that simple!

Today’s question comes to you from Carson Cistulli’s article, “A Haphazard, Historical Examination of Pitcher & Team NERD Scores.” It’s a highly entertaining article that not only takes a detour away from the core source material, but also takes time out to compare yours truly to one of literature’s scariest characters. Good times, these. (It also features the word “beflanneled” — if indeed that is a word.)

In it, Carson takes his NERD scores back a decade, to see just who the most appealing teams were. Cistulli breaks out his top 20 teams in rNERD (or Raw Nerd, or Nerd Score that has not yet been rounded down to 10 or up zero). The question concerning this top 20 list for you, dear reader, is this:

Which three teams appear three times on Cistulli’s “Top 20 Team rNerd Score, 2006-2015” leaderboard?

Note: If you name more than three teams, your entry will be automatically discarded.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member

It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.

We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.

1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.

2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.

3. Dark mode and Classic mode!

4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.

5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.

6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)

7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.

8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.

9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.

10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!

We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Click Here To Become a Member

Good luck!

UPDATE AT 2:02 PM ET: Hint!!! Two of the three teams are in the same division.
UPDATE AT 2:17 PM ET: Second Hint!!! One of the teams in the same division block has a nickname with just four letters.
UPDATE AT 2:30 PM ET: Third Hint!!! Wade Boggs played for two of the three teams, and the third team is located within the same state as one of the two teams Boggs played for.

BAL	CHW	ATH
BOS	CLE	HOU
NYY	DET	LAA
TBR	KCR	SEA
TOR	MIN	TEX

ATL	CHC	ARI
MIA	CIN	COL
NYM	MIL	LAD
PHI	PIT	SDP
WSN	STL	SFG