#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.