#155---NYA @ HOU, 4/9/2019

Not that a typical Yankees/Astros game in recent years wouldn’t be interesting, but this one definitely looks more interesting in retrospect after the scandal and given that Gerrit Cole, who started this game for Houston, is now in the Bronx. A few plays in this game to note, mostly for the scoring:

* The New York third ended when Brett Gardner bunted into a double play, catcher – short – first

* Jose Altuve’s third inning homer was the 100^th of his career

* In the home eighth, Alex Bregman struck out swinging, but Austin Romine couldn’t handle it and he reached on a passed ball. Aledmys Diaz pinch-ran after the second pitch of Brantley’s at bat – I don’t recall what happened and didn’t note it, but I’m assuming it was some kind of injury scare. You can see that the substitution happened after the second pitch because I noted “PR Diaz 4-8 (AB)”, meaning that Diaz pinch ran during the 8^th inning at bat of the fourth place hitter, with “AB” indicating “after B” – that is, after the second pitch of the at bat.

#154---CLE @ ARI, 2/24/2018

This was the first game I had the opportunity to score in 2018, and since I was doing it off the radio I did not keep a pitch-by-pitch account (this is bad enough to do off the radio, but for exhibition games it’s completely hopeless because the announcers will invariably interview someone and you’re lucky if they tell you the direction a batted ball is hit, let alone what happened on the 1-1 pitch or even if there was a 1-1 pitch. That didn’t stop me from trying in the past, but no more.)

The Indians broke the game open with a six-run, three-homer ninth inning, forcing Arizona to run their total of pitchers used to ten. Given the limited space on the sheet, I did not bother marking RBI, and really I should consider doing that on all my sheets…I don’t care about them as a statistical category and if you really want to know, you can count them from by examining the PBP account, which after all is the whole point of keeping a scoresheet.

#153---CHN @ PIT, 4/24/2017

The Cubs beating the tar out of their hosts has become a mini-theme in this space, I guess. I don’t have anything to say about the game itself, except to point out that by tossing the last two innings for the Pirates in his big league debut, Dovydas Neverauskas became the first Lithuanian in MLB.

The good thing about posting scoresheets of blowout games is it generally allows for a lot of different situations and their corresponding representation on the scoresheet to be displayed…here we have batting around, extensive substitutions/position switches, and my favorite, a foul pop caught by the pitcher (see Mercer’s ninth inning at bat).

#152---CLE @ CIN, 3/2/2016

Former Indian Tyler Holt singled. He stole second. Two pitches later, Jessie Winker singled towards the shortstop position. For some reason, second baseman Erik Gonzalez fielded it and threw it away, allowing Holt to score and tie the game. Some guy named Trahan singled and Winker stopped at third. Second and third, nobody out, huge pressure on Indian pitcher Ryan Merritt. Some guy named Hudson lined back to Merrit, who snared it. One out!

Some guy named Cave took strike three. Two out! Trahan took second on indifference. It was all up to Merritt and some guy named Blandino. Fly to center. Inning over. Jam eluded! Extra innings…wait, it was the first weekend of spring training? This dramatic ninth inning ended only paid off in a tie game? How utterly unsatisfying. Maybe a little bit of training for Mr. Merritt on how to respond to pressure later in his career, like if he was forced into making one of his first major league starts against a high-powered offense in Game 5 of the ALCS? No, probably not. But it’s a good story.

#151---CHN @ CLE, 6/17/2015

This was one of the worst drubbings I’ve ever watched my team endure, but it was so bad that it had a comedic aspect to it. Cleveland was trying to find a bargain basement #5 starter in Shaun Marcum, who had missed all of 2014 with injury. But the Cubs battered him for six runs in the second inning. It’s somewhat remarkable that he actually got six swinging strikes on 54 pitches considering how badly this went. Kyle Schwarber, called up to take advantage of an opportunity to DH in an AL park, rapped his first hit with a groundball triple down the rightfield line in the second, and added three singles later for good measure.

After Marcum’s horrific outing, I tweeted something about Ryan Raburn pitching in this game. The people got what they wanted. Raburn came in for the ninth, and somehow got two outs on 23 pitches. There were runners on first and second, he had thrown two balls to David Ross and was hurting, so the Indians decided to bring in David Murphy to relieve him. That’s right--two position players in the same inning, with a mid-PA switch.

I don’t recall when/where/if Murphy warmed up, since he had come into the game in left field in the seventh. Michael Bourn replaced him, taking Raburn’s lineup spot, and Murphy coaxed Ross to popup to end it…except Francisco Lindor muffed the catch. Addison Russell singled, Dexter Fowler walked, Mike Baxter got plunked, and Kris Bryant crushed a grand slam to make it a seven-run inning.

Usually when a team bats around, I just use the column for the next inning and draw lines cordoning off the batters from the previous frame. But in the ninth inning, that’s not an option, so here you can see that in scorebox 4-8, I put a nine in a circle in the upper right hand corner to indicate that I had to go back. Mercifully, Coghlan flied to the warning track to end Murphy’s eighteen pitch outing.
Meanwhile, the Indians were completely shut down by Tsuyoshi Wada.

#150---KC @ CLE, 4/22/2014

Why not pick a scoresheet from my least favorite baseball team of all-time beating my favorite team? It’s everything to hate about these Royals teams in one place. Plating all of the runs in their key fourth inning with two outs, highlighted by a three-run shot from corner infield meathead #1. Corner infield meathead #2 going 4-5 with 3 runs scored and a RBI. At least Nick Swisher reached base three times for the Indians.

#149---BOS @ BAL, 2/27/2013

I’ve posted Spring Training games scored on this sheet before, and I’ve posted games scored using a derivative of LL Bean’s symbol scorekeeping before as well. But I’ve never disclosed the name I call this scoresheet by before because it is silly and didn’t seem relevant.

I have gone through a couple phases in my life where I felt compelled to “design” a bunch of different blank scoresheets. I think I have enough of them now that I always have one on hand that fits my needs for a particular situation, so I haven’t done much of it lately. One of these spurts was in early 2010, as the season approached and the Winter Olympics were being contested.

When I went through one of these phases, I ended up slapping non-sensical names on the various scoresheet designs to tell them apart. After all, there are only so many descriptive names (“two teams, one page, field diagram” might work for this one) available. So I’ve used space shuttles (Columbia, Challenger, etc.), players from my OOTP league (Rollson), and random names in the news. Random names was the theme here, and given the timing, the Olympics were in the news. And a curling skip named Shuster was not exactly getting rave reviews back home in the US, and for some reason I named this scoresheet Shuster. Now he has a gold medal and I’m less likely to forget the name of this sheet.

#148---IND @ CLB, 8/12/2012

In the last entry I extolled the virtues of a spring training scoresheet that featured Mike Trout. Minor league scoresheets sometimes have the same allure. This is not one of them. AAA rosters are generally not packed with prospects, and that was true for this game between the Indians (confusingly to some, the Pirates AAA affiliate) and the Clippers (the Indians affiliate). There are certainly names you probably recognize (Brock Holt, Jose Tabata, Yamaico Navarro, Matt LaPorta, Even Meek to pick a handful), but none that really pop. The game was entertaining enough, with Indianapolis’ four run fourth augmented by a single run in the seventh enough to hold off a late charge from the homestanding Clippers.

#147---LAA @ CLE, 3/11/2011

It’s tough to score Spring Training games. I have done it for as long as I have scored any baseball games; in fact, the earliest extant scoresheets of a professional game I have in my own hand are from spring training 1996 (I definitely kept score of Game 6 of the 1995 World Series and then erased it all in a pique of rage and sadness after the Indians lost). I am now amazed that I was able to do it before GameTracker existed; maybe it’s just my perception, maybe it’s specific announcers, but it seems that now broadcasters barely even try to keep you appraised of changes once the game enters the wholesale substitution phase.

Even the people entrusted to bring the game alive for you will sneer, especially during Spring Training; just last week (as I write this in March 2018), the voice of the Indians Tom Hamilton intoned “If you’re keeping score with us at home, you need to find a new hobby”.

So then why do I score spring training games? For one thing, I miss baseball and scorekeeping after the long winter. At the first opportunity, I want to get out the pencil and the clipboard and a fresh, clean scoresheet and start a new year. For another (related reason), scorekeeping is just what I do. I see a baseball game, I listen to a baseball game, I score it. It’s second-nature, it’s natural, it’s irresistible.

But every once in a while you’ll be partaking in one of these games and a young player will get a token at bat or inning. Maybe you know their name; they might be a late first-round pick from a cold weather state that got exposure by actually showing up at the MLBN studios for the draft. Maybe you don’t know their name, but you’ll recognize it years later.

Maybe he’ll come up to the plate in the ninth-inning to face a legitimate major league reliever like Tony Sipp. Maybe he’ll work the count to full watching all five pitches before he strikes out swinging to end the game. But you probably won’t remember it. If you look at the scoresheet after the game, it won’t resonate. You don’t know it yet, but you will. The man, the magic, the aura, the legend, the myth:

Trout.

#146---ATL @ NYN, 4/25/2010

This isn’t the shortest possible scoresheet for a game that counts, but it’s close. Most of the key moments in this game came with two outs in the first. In the top, Atlanta loaded the bases before Jason Heyward popped up. In the bottom, Jose Reyes dropped a single into left. He stole second on the second pitch to Jason Bay, and on the next pitch Bay singled to Chipper Jones, who threw it away to allow Reyes to score.

Rain came after one pitch was thrown in the top of the sixth. I’ve always thought that would wipe Raul Valdes’ relief appearance out of history, resulting in a pair of complete games after the starters combined to make 199 pitches through five innings, but who really cares about the intricacies of the complete game rule?

My notation for Hanson's strikeout in the second deserves a little exposition. The squiggly line underneath is my symbol for bunt. If its attached to a strikeout, by default it should be interpreted as a foul bunt for the thirds trike. In this case, Hanson offered at the pitch but did not make contact, so the brace indicates a swinging bunt K (the brace is my usual symbol on a pitch letter for a swinging strike, as seen on pitch B to Jose Reyes in the bottom of the first and many other places on the sheet. You could have a backwards K with a bunt line too, in the event the batter showed bunt but took the pitch for strike three.