Swing and a miss: Survey says Diamondbacks fans are baseball’s dumbest

It’s hard enough for Arizona Diamondbacks fans to watch their team constantly struggle with injuries and fail to play up to its full potential. Now a new survey of baseball knowledge is calling them stupid.

That’s the conclusion reached by a survey conducted by Casino.ca, a Canadian betting website. The site commissioned an online survey of 5,000 fans of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams, testing their general baseball knowledge with a 20-question quiz. Diamondbacks fans performed the worst of any fandom, tying Texas Rangers fans by correctly answering only half the questions.

Granted, many of the multiple-choice questions are pretty, well, inside baseball. Survey respondents were asked what constitutes a balk, an action many umpires struggle to identify. They were also asked whether a pitcher can switch throwing hands in the middle of an at-bat — there are currently no ambidextrous pitchers in the majors, so seems like a moot point — and which player has the most career grand slams. Suffice it to say, if you got most of the survey’s questions right, you really know ball.

Before taking the quiz, fans were also asked to rate their own level of baseball knowledge, and here Diamondbacks fans deserve credit. While similarly laggard Rangers fans rated their knowledge an 8 out of 10 before scoring only 50% on the quiz, Diamondbacks fans had a more realistic self-assessment — on average, they rated their knowledge a 6 out of 10.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most knowledgeable fan bases were those of the New York Yankees and the New York Mets.

Though the quiz is a tough one, let’s take its findings at face value. Why might Diamondbacks fans bring up the rear in baseball knowledge? After all, the Valley is rich with baseball heritage, with robust prep and college programs, the Cactus League and many former pros calling it home.

It could be because the team has never really won in the sustained fashion that builds a passionate and informed following. The club hasn’t made the playoffs in back-to-back seasons in more than two decades, leaving its postseason runs — including its 2001 World Series title and 2023 World Series appearance — as oases in a parched desert of mediocrity. In the 10 years under manager Torey Lovullo and general manager Mike Hazen, the team has gone 709-738 as of Wednesday morning. And this has been one of the more stable and competitive eras of Diamondbacks baseball ever.