Monday, July 11, 2016

#111---SEA @ CLE, 4/21/2016






Sometimes I find myself somewhere with a ballgame on the radio and really want to keep score, but I didn’t expect to have that opportunity and don’t have a scoresheet handy. Or I’m not sure if I’ll be able to take in the whole game and don’t want to “waste” a pre-printed sheet on the game (because that $0.09 printing cost is inhibitive). In such cases, improvisation is an option if there is paper available.

This is one such example. I simply took a standard 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper and folded it in half (vertically), using one side for the visitors innings and the other side for home. Unfortunately, this sheet really reveals why I’m an analyst/writer and not an artist, as I found that I was using way too much space for each inning and had to shrink down. I also shouldn’t have used diamonds, which inherently involve more art than my usual approach.


I decided during the game that I would make a simple pre-printed form to avoid any such future problems…and then ended up being able to test it right away as the game went to extra innings. Seattle had a built a lead off shaky pitching from Cody Anderson and Trevor Bauer, but Cleveland chipped away, with the big blows a three run homer from Rajai Davis to open the scoring and a two out, two run pinch hit homer to tie it in the eighth from Mike Napoli. But in the tenth, Robinson Cano hit a three run blast off Cody Allen and Seattle won 10-7. Note that I tracked the running tally for each team by writing the number of the run inside each diamond; usually when I use diamonds, I just use a dot for a run scored, but knew I wouldn’t have a lot of space for summary stats on this scoresheet.

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