Saturday, April 5, 2008

#5---KC @ CLE, 9/20/1996

I attended the September 20, 1996 game at Jacobs Field, and thus I did keep score. I went back to using a Score-Right sheet. The game was unremarkable, with the Royals winning 6-4 against an Indians team that had already clinched the division title.

The scorekeeping was thoroughly unremarkable as well. It has the hallmarks of a sheet kept sloppily at a ballpark. Compared to my sheet from earlier in the season (#2), the quality of my scorekeeping had actually declined, although some of this had to be due to the ballpark setting.

The only improvement was utilizing the diamond by tracing the progress of runners. Unfortunately, this coincided with a lack of explaining how the runners progressed or even responsibility for RBI. Pitching changes were still clumsily indicated by writing the name at the bottom of the scorebox of the first batter faced, and the final score is nowhere to be found (also, in an unintentional error, the line score lists Cleveland with zero runs in the fifth when in fact they scored three. Jeff Kent’s means of reaching base in that inning is not recorded--it was a three-run longball).

One thing that made no sense to me when looking at this sheet was the scoring in the KC second. Randa singled, then has an “F” mark at second indicating he was retired on a fielder’s choice (16, hit into by Offerman). Offerman in turn was retired on Myers’ fielder’s choice. But what does “F6F” mean?

Looking at the Retrosheet scoring for the game, I have no idea what I was thinking at the time. First of all, Offerman’s FC was hit to first and was 36, not 16. The Myers play was a 46 FC--why that was “F6F” is a mystery to me. I hope it was just a mistake, intended to be “F46”, but who knows?

As has been the case with all of my sheets so far, I also made no mark to easily distinguish the end of the inning. I currently use a slash, but any of the techniques in use (some people draw two little hash marks at the bottom of the box, some people x out the first unused box, etc.) would make the sheet a lot easier to read.

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