#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.