Last year’s Opening Day game for the Blue Jays and Yankees marked the first game for Didi Gregorius as Derek Jeter’s replacement and the major league debuts of Deveon Travis (an impressive two walks and a homer) and Miguel Castro (who retired all three Yankees he faced and got out of the eighth when Gregorius, clearly cracking under the pressure of replacing His Holiness, was inexplicably caught stealing third with runners on first & second, two outs, and the Bombers down five runs).
A-Rod also returned from his inane suspension with a single and a walk, while the Jays got to Masahiro Tanaka for five runs in the third, capped by a two-run shot by Edwin Encarnacion.
I don’t think there are any new notations here, but I will draw your attention to how I indicate shifts, which obviously are a bigger factor now than before. I have no way of marking a shift unless an out is recorded; even if I wanted to clutter my scoresheet with that information, it would only be possible when at the park. Most telecasts are too busy showing moron fans to bother with trivialities like where the fielders are positioned.
But if the fielder makes a play outside of his normal position, I mark it with subscript. So on Navarro’s groundout in the third, Gregorius (the shortstop, 6) made the play up the middle, but on the shortstop’s side of the bag (64). Headley’s groundout in the fourth came as Travis was positioned in shallow right-center (98S).
Or as I put it in a blog comment:
From the perspective of a “pleasure scorekeeper”, I don’t endeavor to record zones to the level that a Project Scoresheet-style scorekeeper would. I use a subscript if the fielder who makes the play is significantly removed from his normal position. 4(9S)3, where the 9S is actually written in subscript between the 4 and the 3, would indicate a 43 putout in which the second baseman fields the ball in shallow right. Similarily, 6(46)3 would be a 63 in which the shortstop fields the ball on the second base side of the bag, but not in the standard second base zone--that would be 6(4)3.
I divide the outfield into 7l, 7, 78, 87, 8, 89, 98, 9, and 9l, which I would also use for a groundball hit through the infield regardless of whether it might have been hit at the fielder’s normal position. So a single through the vacated third base position would probably just be a -7l or a -7 (line below the 7 to indicate a groundball).
The distinction between the zones and the “standard” fielder positions is all just on what it looks or feels like to me, so obviously this approach is not suited for collecting data for analytical purposes. But as a relatively simple and space-conserving way in which to reflect some of this information on a traditional scoresheet, I find it satisfactory.
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