The Major League Baseball All-Star Game is tonight (July 19th) and in the festive spirit of things, it's always a good time to test our very own state's trivia when it comes to professional baseball players from the Cowboy State. So what professional baseball player from Wyoming had the longest career overall?

While we all know that Wyoming has the smallest population of any state, it is also safe to assume that the Cowboy State has had one of the smallest number of professional baseball players come from the state. In that particular statistic, we finished second to last as Alaska had the least of all-time with 12. Wyoming has had 16 professional baseball players come from the state. The state of California had the most with 2,376. That's quite a difference.

So who from Wyoming had the longest career out of the 16 pro baseball players?

Let's answer that question with a fun fact about them. He's a pitcher that was the only player to strike out MLB legend Stan Musial three times in one game and that would be the only time in Musial's career that such a thing as striking out three times in one game would happen. That's pretty remarkable given how often that happens every week in today's game. But we digress, who performed this feat?...

None other than left-hander, Dick Ellsworth.

Dick Ellsworth was born in Lusk, WY in 1940. He made his major league debut at age 18 for the Chicago Cubs and pitched for them for the first eight seasons of his 13 year career (1958 through 1971). He had a career record of 115 wins and 137 losses with a 3.72 earned-run average. Typically that type of earned-run average (ERA) in today's game would earn most starting pitchers a relatively decent record each year, and probably better than the career .456 win percentage that Ellsworth finished with.

Then again, let's remember, he unfortunately had to play for the Cubs for most of his career, so the Cubs did a lot of what the Cubs are used to doing on the field...not winning.

So perhaps when this piece of trivia comes up when you're watching the All-Star Game tonight or any other baseball game for that matter, you can act like the know-it-all who found this fun fact. Perhaps you'll use it at the next bar trivia you attend. Either way, you now know who had the longest professional baseball career as someone who came from Wyoming.

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Did you know it would take the populations of Gillette (32,857), Laramie (32,381), Rock Springs (23,319), Sheridan (17,844) and Wright (1,200) to create a sellout inside Michigan's famed 107,601-seat Big House, the largest college football stadium in the nation?

For those of you not familiar with the Cowboy State, those are Wyoming's third through sixth most inhabited cities, along with the small mining town in Campbell County.

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