TO OUR READERS

Sharpen those No. 2 pencils, sports fans. It's time for a few quick brainteasers. Here's a good one. Q: What is the weight of the largest warsaw grouper ever caught? Too tough? O.K., let's try something—excuse the pun—a little more mainstream. Q: Who won the Cy Young Award the last time it was given to a single pitcher rather than to one from each league? Anyone, anyone? Give up?

The answers to those questions and countless others can be found in the Sports Illustrated 1994 Sports Almanac (Little, Brown, $10.95), which arrived at your local bookstore last week. SI's almanac includes hard data on just about every sport, and, at 816 pages, the current version is 144 pages longer than our first edition, which we published two years ago. Other notable changes and improvements include a greatly expanded table of contents that allows for easy referencing and an increased coverage of all the major sports as well as the more esoteric ones, such as sled dog racing, handball and calf roping. There is also a complete listing of the addresses, phone numbers and key personnel for all professional sports teams, major colleges and U.S. amateur sports organizations.

You want to take another stab? Try this one: Which NHL goal-tender had the most career shutouts? "It's the kind of book that can turn almost anyone into a sports authority," says SI special contributor Merrell Noden, who became somewhat of a sports authority himself while helping to edit the '94 almanac. Now it's almost commonplace for Noden to breezily announce, "Did you know that Tris Speaker is baseball's alltime leader in career regular-season doubles, with 792?"

We did know that. In fact, after perusing the almanac's beefed-up profile section, we learned that Speaker is also the alltime leader among outfielders in assists and double plays.

Perhaps the most distinctive elements of the almanac, though, are the 16 pages of color photographs and the 22 year-end essays contributed by SI writers, including Jack McCallum, Phil Taylor and Alexander Wolff.

For those of you still pondering the answers to our little pop quiz, the heaviest warsaw grouper ever caught tipped the scales at 436 pounds, 12 ounces. (It was reeled in near Destin, Fla., by Steve Haeusler in 1985.) In 1966 L.A. Dodger Sandy Koufax became the last pitcher to win the combined Cy Young Award. And Terry Sawchuk's 103 career shutouts are tops among NHL goaltenders.

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