#4---CLE @ DET, 5/26/1996

For a brief time in 1996, I scored games in a new scorebook. I was given it as a gift, and I quickly tired of the book after scoring four games in it. It was a B&B Stat-Master scorebook.

I cannot find a website for B&B scorebooks; I don’t know if they still exist or not. The scorebook does not fit my current preference for simplicity, but it was pretty good for the busy commercial scorebooks, with one glaring problem. One thing that I hate is what Bill James called the “multiple choice quiz”, where the various means of reaching base are listed and you are supposed to circle or mark the applicable one. The B&B scorebook avoided this problem; it also had boxes for balls and strikes, a circle in which to record the out number, a blank space to record the outcome of the at bat, and a box in which to record RBI. While I think all that is overkill, I’d rather have all of that than an otherwise plain box with the multiple choice quiz.

Unfortunately, this scorebook prints the position numbers on the diamond in each and every scorebox. I have always been perplexed by scoresheets that do this. Do they think that the scorer is incapable of remembering the numbers? It might be okay if the boxes were big enough to cleanly circle or mark the numbers to denote fielding plays (for example, on a groundout to short you could just circle the 6), but they’re not. So the result is a bunch of unnecessary clutter.

The scoring system I was using at the time did not help with the issue of clutter. I wrote out “FLY”, “POP”, and “LINE” for outs hit in the air. Why not just “F”, “P”, or “L”? Now, I prefer to use modifiers only when the event is unusual. For example, if the left fielder catches a ball, I assume it is a fly. If it wasn’t, and it was a line drive or something else, than I designate that.

I also insisted on drawing an arrow to where the ball was hit, which adds information for hits, but is repetitive when it comes to outs. I still was not tracking runners’ progress by tracing the diamond, and it is still darn hard to find the score on the sheet. I looked up the score on Baseball-Reference instead of trying to count the runs on the sheet. It was 5-0, Cleveland.

#3---BOS @ CLE, 4/19/1996

As mentioned last week, during the early days of the 1996 season, I alternated between using leftover softball scoresheets and loose-leaf, cross-style scoring. Apparently, as the season went on I stopped keeping score, because I don’t have many surviving scoresheets past May, and it’s doubtful I threw them out at any point.

For these games, I used a lineup page with line score similar to the one shown in post #1, so I will not reproduce one of those here. I have only posted the six full innings here, as the end of the game was unremarkable and the scoring system the same in this 9-4 Cleveland win.

Again, the need to write out the name of the batter and pitcher for each confrontation makes this method of scoring tedious. I also have no idea why I drew a cross for each batter instead of only doing that once a runner reached base--it would have reduced clutter and made outs easier to pick out.

The evolution on display here though from my earlier sheets is that runner advancement is marked by using the lineup position of the batter who caused it. For instance, looking at the top of the first, Dwayne Hosey drew a walk and stole second. He was then advanced to third by the actions of the #2 hitter (John Valentin grounded to short), and scored on the actions of the #3 hitter (Mo Vaughn hit a sac fly to left, with the “X” again serving as the RBI marker).

#2---NYA @ CLE, 4/2/1996

Last week, we looked at my nascent scoring efforts circa spring training 1996. Once the regular season rolled around, I scrapped the labor-intensive scoring. For some games, I used plain notebook paper, but did not record pitches, using crosses instead of diamonds. For others, I used some old pages from a softball scorebook. I’ll deal with the crosses next time, but since on Opening Day I used the scorebook pages, that will come first.

The sheet used was from a Score-Right scorebook; I can't find a link for them, but they are still available, although I'm not sure this 18-batter one is still published. If you happen to stumble across a picture of one of their new scorebooks on the net, you'll see that the diamond drawing remains the same.

The April 2 opener between the Yankees and the Indians at Jacobs Field proved to be a matchup between the defending AL champs (Cleveland) and the to-be world champs (New York). The game should have been played a day earlier, but a heavy April snowfall on the shores of Lake Erie prevented that from happening.

This was the first game that I scored on a sheet of this type, so apparently I felt it was necessary to make notes to myself about how to use it (note the instructions for what to do should the game go to extra innings). Even with the predrawn diamonds, I did not do the usual thing and trace the runner’s progress around the bases. Instead, I wrote the event that advanced the runner to a given base near the base, which makes it very hard to read, and worse yet, makes the number of runs scored very hard to ascertain. Also, nowhere on the sheet did I record the final score. While scoresheets should convey a great deal of information about a ballgame, one should never forget that “score” is the root word.

The means of recording pitching changes is also rather clumsy--writing his name in the bottom of the box of the first batter faced. Writing out “1 RBI” and the like at the top of the box shows a startling lack of creativity. The most bizarre decision of all is to record the Indians’ at-bats at the top of the page, despite the fact they are the home team.

Notice the #9 hitter for the Yankees--one Derek Jeter, who hit his first major league home run leading off the top of the fifth against Dennis Martinez. I should also point out that this was Joe Torre's first game as manager of the Yankees--maybe the odd practice of writing the managers' names on the scoresheets has some previously unseen benefit.

#1---PIT @ CLE, 3/30/1996

This blog is going to be about baseball scorekeeping, and about nothing else. Each week, I plan to post a picture of a game that I have scored. Eventually, if readers would like to submit their scoresheets, than I will include some of those as well. Also, I apologize for the black background--I'm not a big fan of it, but I thought the scoresheets would look better contrasted against it (although you will probably have to click on the pictures to view them in a larger size anyway).

As a word of introduction, I am a huge baseball fan who considers himself a sabermetrician. I have published some of my work online as “Patriot”, and I blog on baseball in general as well as sabermetrics at Walk Like a Sabermetrician. I also maintain a very rudimentary scorekeeping site, Baseball Scoresheets. Sometime, I will discuss my philosophy of scoring and that sort of thing here, but I have already done a little of that over there, so check it out if you are interested in that sort of thing.

I am a hopeless scorekeeping nut. I cannot watch or listen to a baseball game without keeping score. Even if I am doing something else and am unable to begin following the game, as long as I am able to do so during the early or middle innings, I go on MLB.com or some other gametracker site and catch up on what I missed. I suppose in some respects it has become a crutch, and has in my case actually reduced my ability to follow a game because I feel lost without a scoresheet.

Anyway, this has been the case since around 1998 or so, but my earliest major league scorekeeping venture that I can recall was Game 6 of the 1995 World Series. I scored it on a sheet torn out of a baseball/softball scorebook, something I did a fair amount of in my beginning days (before I recognized how inadequate most of them were for scoring baseball). I would be very interested to go back and look at what kind of notation I used, but unfortunately, I took an eraser to the entire sheet after the outcome of the game broke my heart.

With that effort lost to history, the earliest intact sheets I have are from spring training, 1996. Yes, I am one of those freaks who scores spring training games, and still do. It’s so exciting to have baseball back after a long, cold winter that one can gloss over the fact that the games are meaningless. Plus, if scoring is not yet second nature to you (I have scored enough games that it is), it’s great practice after a winter off--99% of regular season games are much easier to keep track of, particularly when it comes to substitutions.

My spring training sheets from 1996 were certainly a labor of love. I scored the games on loose leaf notebook paper which I compiled in a binder. On the first page, I wrote the lineups and any substitutions. On the subsequent pages, I tracked the action by drawing a diamond and ball/strike boxes for each hitter. Also, since the lineups and the rudimentary scoreboxes were removed from each other, I wrote the name of the batter and the pitcher for each at bat. The closest thing that I have ever seen anyone else do is Alex Reisner’s system, but while it does have some redundancy, it involves much less writing, much easier tracking, and no redundant drawing exercises.

Other aspects of the system were just as dumb. Many scorers do not mark how runners were advanced on the bases, unless it occurs through statistically-tracked events like wild pitches, stolen bases, and balks. That has never been comprehensive enough for me, and that includes spring training games in 1996. Unfortunately, rather than doing something sensible like marking advances by using the batting order position of the responsible batter (as I do now), the uniform number of the responsible batter, etc., I drew the symbol for the event that advanced him.

The outcome of each batter was recorded in the diamond, with standard-type symbols. Suppose a batter doubled; he would get an “ = “ mark inside his diamond. Suppose he was then advanced to third on a single by the subsequent batter; at third base, I would mark “ – “, to show that he advanced on a single. If he later scored due to a walk, there would be a “ W “ by the home plate corner of the diamond. Later, it appears that I added the fielding position of the man responsible in a circle, so “R - (6)“ indicated a run scored on a single by the shortstop.

Looking back at one of these sheets a dozen years later, it is hard for me to remember what all of the scribblings were supposed to mean, but I believe that I marked runs scored with a “ R “ next to home plate (in addition to the notation of how the advancement to the plate occurred as described above), and RBIs with a “X”. So a solo home run would get both a R and a X by home plate, although to make it even more confusing, it appears that I did not have a set order, and so sometimes this was noted as “RX” and sometimes as “XR”.

Anyway, below are scans of the lineup page and the first scoring page from the March 30, 1996 exhibition game at Jacobs Field between the Pirates and Indians. The quality is not good, and the handwriting is terrible (it still is). As always with the pictures on this blog, click on it to see a larger version.

Looking at these pages, other than the issues already mentioned, I couldn’t spell “Miceli”, as in Dan. But everyone has to start somewhere, I guess. Also, it appears that I gave credit to Vizquel for a RBI on a 643 double play, which is obviously wrong.