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
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.
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