Keeping Score

I read an article in the New York Times about how the act of scorekeeping a baseball game has diminished in practice. People hardly sit still enough to watch the game, let alone track every at bat. There was a lot of reminiscing about the days when you could get a scorecard for a nickel, and that came with that little pencil without an eraser, like the kind that you get miniature golf courses.

The common scoring system is thought to have been invented by Henry Chadwick, who also came up with the box score, another indispensable piece of baseball nerd-dom. It seems that the scoring system, using numbers one through nine for each position on the field, pitcher being 1, catcher 2 and so on, is universal throughout the baseball world. Usually it's passed down from father to son, and that's true in my case, as my father taught me how to keep score. There are variations, of course, such as using a backwards K for a called strike (I would put a "c" or an "s" after the K, do distinguish between called and swung), or adding little things like a notation as to how reach runner advanced around the basepaths. Scoring books purchased at the sporting goods store even had room for counting balls and strikes, and of course now there are more sophisticated systems used to chart pitches.

Nowadays programs that have a score sheet in the center can cost up to ten dollars, but you still get the pencil for free. Really all you need is the scorecard--the rest is advertising and fluffy features. In the old days, the scorecard also had the rosters and the pitching staffs for out-of-town teams, so you knew who was pitching all around the majors by the lights on the scoreboard. For those who don't want to pay, you can always get those store-bought scorebooks, that can hold a number of games in one (I bought one once and kept score of games off of TV--but trying to score an All-Star Game is particularly difficult, given the double switches and all the players used). Scoring a game that goes more than ten innings is always a problem, too.

I don't keep score anymore--I don't think I have in twenty years or more. I finally found it to be work, when I'd rather just soak up the atmosphere. I also finally realized the notion that I would go back and look at them to be ridiculous. Still, if I attend a game with someone who does keep score, I use them for information. Once I attended a game with my friend Bob and we noticed that the Yankees were leaving a lot of men on base, and, finding the record for such a thing on his smartphone, kept track of it during the game. You can't do that without a scorecard.

Scorecards are excellent visual representations of the game, though. You can look at a scorecard and "read" the game, much more than you can a box score. Roger Angell once told of a fan sending him a fictional scorecard of a game in which Angell pitched and led a team of Red Sox outcasts against an All-Star team, and the outcasts won, but barely, nearly escaping disaster at every turn. All this was visible in the scorecard.

With the overall ADHD of each successive generation, keeping score at the ball game will be increasingly rare, but I don't think it will ever die out. Broadcasters need to do it, and there will always be die-hards, like Bob, that insist on doing it. Though I don't do it anymore, I'm always heartened to see anyone under the age of forty actually keeping score. It's a great tradition.