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,
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