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Remember when you bet $1 that Rollie Fingers had more than 1,300 career strikeouts - a dispute you never bothered to resolve? It's time to settle up. According to behind-the-scenes trivia engine Fact City, he had 1,299.
Fact City licenses databases of factoids to sites like ESPN.com and FoxSports.com, and has set up a decent plain-English search interface. With its precollected and structured data, Fact City instantly calls up answers, not just vaguely related Web pages. Fact City's baseball engine churns out the requisite team and player stats, as well as minutiae like throwing hand, playing surface, and - in the case of California Angels slugger Mo Vaughn - weight (a hefty 268). The answer cites the original source, so you know you're not just probing some bleacher bum's addled memory.
Besides fielding baseball queries, Fact City covers movies, music, and television on Movies.com, Wall of Sound, and Mr. Showbiz. Backed with databases from TV Guide Online, Billboard Online, and the Internet Movie Database, Fact City answers niggling questions like "Who shot J.R.?" and "What's the name of Glenn Frey's first solo album?" Unlike IMDb, where cinephile stats like the year Chinatown was released are still two clicks away, with Fact City, the answer comes immediately. By the end of summer, the company aims to have its databases invisibly incorporated into portal search engines and will add demographic and geographic info to the collection. That way, you can settle sports bets with your pals and impress your boss when you come up with the population of Mauritius.
Fact City: free. Available at fox-mlb.factcity.net and espn-mlb.factcity.net, among other locations. Fact City: www.factcity.com.
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