#25---CHA @ CLE, 3/31/2008

The opening day game between the White Sox and Indians was a fun game to watch and an interesting game to score.

Jim Thome’s two two-run homers kept the ChiSox in the game despite Cleveland’s seven run outburst in the second. They chipped away at CC Sabathia and the bullpen until drawing even in the seventh. Meanwhile, Nick Masset was brilliant in relief of Mark Buerhle, shutting the Indians out over 4 1/3, fanning four and allowing just two hits.

In the top of the eighth, Crede and Uribe led off with doubles, yet Crede did not score and was held as third at third. After an intentional walk to Nick Swisher, Orlando Cabrera grounded to short. Peralta’s throw home was high, but Kelly Shoppach was able to tag Crede (or at least that’s how home plate umpire Gerry Davis saw it). Then Jim Thome grounded to second; Asdrubal Cabrera flipped to Peralta for the out, and Orlando Cabrera wiped Peralta out, but also grabbed him around the leg, leading to Thome being called out for interference.

In the bottom of the eighth, Casey Blake’s two-out, two-strike three-run double gave the Indians a 10-7 lead, and Joe Borowski was able to hold the White Sox to one in the top of the ninth for a 10-8 victory.

Re: the scoring, you can see that I’ve reduced the use of letters like “L” or “B” to modify other codes. The idea of using lines under the location for groundballs, above for line drives, and arcs for flyballs comes from Paul Dickson in The Joy of Keeping Score. The groundball line can be seen on Martinez’ second inning single, the line drive on Peralta’s single in the next plate appearance. The final play of the game, marked `5, is a foul out to third, which I previously would have marked as “f5”.

There were a couple interesting things to score. One was Cleveland batting around in the second. During Peralta’s second at bat, Victor Martinez was thrown out attempting to advance to second on a wild pitch (it is not in fact a wild pitch, since he didn’t make it (he would have had he not fallen and injured himself on the way), but I mark it as “CSWP” so that we know it wasn’t a straight steal). This meant that Peralta’s box would have to be used again when he took his turn in the third inning. So I drew lines under and adjacent to the balls and strikes listed for the first at bat, and wrote “I” in the ball column and “E” in the strike column for inning ended, which is how I would mark such an event in a normal situation. Usually, though, you just move on to the box in the next inning. Here, I kept going in the smaller space this created, since it was already in the box for the next inning.

The aforementioned interference double play was marked by a subscript “INT” after the part of the play that was actually completed. I’ve used parentheses or brackets in the past (i.e. 64[INT]3), and that works too.

#24---TOR @ CLE, 3/13/2008

I still can’t help myself when it comes to scoring spring training games. Here is a 2008 example of this.

Since the game is a run of the mill exhibition, I’ll instead discuss the changes I made to my scoring this year. I decided that I had too many letters and numbers on the sheet, so I changed the way I score hits and modify some out codes. My old method of scoring hits was a three symbol code, something like “=8L”. The “=” indicates that it is a double, the “8” is for centerfield, and the “L” is for line drive. I decided to eliminate the letter describing the trajectory of the hit.

The decision I made was to use a small horizontal line over the location to indicate a line drive (see Zaun’s first inning single), a similar line under the location to indicate a groundball (see Barfield’s first inning single), and a curved line over the location to indicate a flyball (not seen on this scoresheet). Additionally, I decided that all outfield hits would be considered flyballs by default, and so a hit with an outfield location but no symbol is assumed to be a flyball (see Hafner’s first inning single). Any infield hit (not seen here either) is assumed to be a groundball.

I also used these to modify outs, so a 7 with a line over it is a line drive caught by the left fielder, which I used to mark as “L7” (again, there are none of these in this particular game). A squiggly line underneath the location indicates a bunt, which can be used for a hit or an out. A combination of the line drive and flyball symbols indicates a looper, which is my designation for a ball that straddles those two categories (I used to mark them “LP”). A mark like this “`” to the side of a play indicates that it was made in foul territory. “1-43”, in the case of Sandoval’s fifth inning at bat, indicates a ball that was deflected by the pitcher to the second baseman, who threw to first for the out (I used to mark this d143). I will point out some of those when they come up in later scoresheets--this game didn’t have many unusual plays to record.

I also changed, ever so slightly, my method for recording when a pitcher enters the game. I used to mark something like “Parrish 3-4”, which means that the first batter John Parrish faced was the #3 hitter in the lineup, and it happened in the fourth inning. As you can see, I still do that, sometimes. But now, if a pitcher enters at the start of an inning, I omit the lineup slot portion of the code (ex. “Laffey 5” means that Laffey took over on the mound at the start of the fifth inning). This just serves to reduce a small bit of unnecessary clutter.

#22---KC @ CLE, 5/16/2006

Somehow, I managed to miss #22, so here it is, batting out of turn. I also apologize for the horrific formatting on this page, which is a product of 1) Blogger's mangling of what I copy and paste from Word and 2) my lack of motivation to go back and correct it all (and my lack of HTML skills that make it a real chore).

This game is a good opportunity to show the new pitch coding system I began using in 2006. Rather than treating all strikes the same, when I scored a game from TV or the internet, I distinguished swinging, called, and foul strikes. Called strikes received a plain letter (ex. B), while fouls got a bracket on the left (ex. [B), and swinging strikes a brace (ex. {B).

Tracking swinging strikes can be eye-opening, because you will find that major league hitters just don’t swing and miss that often. I was aware of this before, of course, but tracking it brought it more to my attention. There were 16 swinging strikes in this game on zero or one strike counts.

This game also has a “d163” notation (Sizemore’s first inning AB) for a ball deflected by the pitcher to the shortstop, who threw to first for the out. I would now mark this (1-63).

The sixth inning flyball hit by Emil Brown is marked 9 with a subscript 8. This means that the right fielder made the catch in center field. This notation is useful for shifts; for example, 5(subscript 6)3 indicates a play in which the third baseman throws out a runner at first while positioned around where the shortstop should be.

The ninth inning walk drawn by Tony Graffanino is marked “aW” for automatic; in this case, Jason Davis was called for an automatic ball for illegally going to his mouth. The ball symbols can also be marked this way, but in this case only the fourth ball was automatic.

The game pitted former Royal Paul Byrd against former (just a season ago) Indian Scott Elarton. KC touched Byrd up for three runs in the first, but the Indians matched that in the third. Matt Stairs homer to leadoff the sixth gave the Royals a 4-3 lead, and the score held as Ambiroix Burgos was summoned to close the game out. Grady Sizemore shattered that chance with a leadoff homer. After fanning Jason Michaels, Burgos lost Jhonny Peralta, and Andy Sisco was summoned to get the platoon advantage on Travis Hafner. Pronk took a ball, then slugged a homer to center to win it for the Tribe, 6-4.

#23---WAS @ ATL, 4/12/2007

On April 12, the Nationals were hurting. They were off to a dreadful start, 1-8 having already lost the first two games of their series at Turner Field. Atlanta was almost a mirror image at 7-2.

A pitching matchup of Jason Bergmann against John Smoltz did not inspire a great deal of confidence. Nonetheless, Bergmann held the Braves hitless until Andruw Jones led off the fourth with a double. In the mean time, Smoltz shutout Washington through seven. In the eighth, the Nationals put two across to take the lead.

Meanwhile, Bergmann left after six. Jesus Colome and Jon Rauch were perfect in the seventh and the eighth, respectively, and the Braves still had just one hit when Chad Cordero entered in the ninth. Chipper Jones got a one out single, and Andruw worked a walk. Cordero struck out McCann looking, then managed to walk Jeff Francoeur of all people to load the bases. It was up to the haplessly performing Scott Thorman, but he struck out on eight pitches and Washington pitchers had combined to two-hit the Braves, 2-0.