1. Baseballs were originally made from the foreskins of horses.

2. The state sport of Alabama is figure skating.

3. A race car with a wood-burning engine finished 3rd in the 1927 Indianapolis 500.

4. Boxing legend Rocky Marciano invented the fax machine.

5. Studies show high school tennis players score significantly lower on math tests, it is assumed because of the sport’s illogical 15–30–40 scoring system.

6. According to the official Major League Baseball rule book, baseball games “are to last 9 innings or two and one-half hours, whichever comes first.”

7. The NCAA required college football players to study during halftime until 1925. That sure would make picking lines for the game at BetOnline difficult!

8. The Houston Rockets did not discover until the 14th game of the 1984–85 NBA season that their home arena rims were set at 9-feet, 7-inches.

9. It is customary for jockeys to be paid in coins, no matter how large their winnings.

10. In the ancient Greek Olympics, wrestling matches were in the nude and a match did not end until one of the competitors became aroused.

11. The Stanley Cup was originally two stories tall but was deemed too difficult to transport.

12. In 2008, Michael Vick’s prison intramural football team went 3–5.

13. Most broken Major League bats are sent to third world countries where they are used as building materials and crude weapons.

14. The O-Chimp-ics, a multi-sport international event for monkeys, was held every four years from 1952 to 1960.

15. Golf balls were originally made from dried cow eyeballs.

16. Hockey legend Gordie Howe suffers from cryophobia, the extreme fear of cold and ice.

17. The grass at Wimbledon was kept two inches long until 1949 when an English player was bitten by a snake.

18. No Olympic steeplechase silver medalist, male or female, has lived past the age of 41.

19. Former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was born with a spinal protuberance that looked like a small tail, which he kept all his life.

20. During Vin Scully’s first year as a broadcaster in 1957, he was suspended by the Dodgers for calling a home run with “He hit that like it was Marilyn Monroe!”

21. A man in Mississippi was briefly imprisoned for “sorcery” in 1884 after throwing a curveball at a county fair.

22. Surfing is an optical illusion.

23. Babe Ruth once said he knew he didn’t swing hard enough if “a little poop didn’t come out.”

24. During a two-week hamstring injury in 1948, the Dodgers secretly replaced Jackie Robinson in the lineup with a white man in black face named Herschel Morowitz.

25. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Super Bowl in 2003.

About SportsPickle

SportsPickle is the premier site on the Internet for sports news and takes.