Marty Lurie Talks San Francisco Giants Baseball
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WRITIN' BASEBALL

THE LOST ART OF KEEPING SCORE

BY ALAN GOLDFARB


As someone who covers baseball, I take a fat white-covered, spiral-bound book with me to every game. It’s a small book really, but when one peruses its pages, wonderful stories are revealed. The stories are told, however, not in words, but in symbols. The symbols are so cryptic, that in another time, they could very well be mistaken for hieroglyphs. I refer, of course, to the baseball scorebook. Keeping score at a baseball game is one of those rituals that, as the game becomes slower and louder and busier — conditions brought about by fussing pitchers, fidgety batters, and TV commercials; high-decibel music; and annoying between-innings PA announcers — the art of keeping score is becoming a rare thing, indeed.

Walk up and down the aisles at a ballpark today, and what you see is but a smattering of scorebooks, which sit at the ready on the laps of only those few remaining diehard baseball fans. Everyone else is either on their cell phone, reading a newspaper — which is invariably opened to the business section — or constantly leaving their seats for another beer or another piece of junk food, the latter of which is disguised as “gourmet.”

But the fan who keeps a scorebook and a set of different colored and sharpened pencils at the ready, knows well the symbols which are used to tell the story of the game being played out before them. Curiously, there are no real rules delineating how to keep score, which makes score keeping an individual exercise. But there are some symbols, which have become universal.

For instance, when one jots down a single horizontal line in the small square opposite a player’s name and position, it indicates a base hit. Marking a “3U” in hitter’s box, specifies that the first baseman made the out unassisted. The symbol for a homer, fairly jumps off the page onomotopoetically. The little square now is filled to the brim with four horizontal marks one above the other, as if it’s some strange form of code.

The serious baseball scorekeeper might then take those scratches and extrapolate them. The lone line indicating a single can then tell the story of the base hit. If it was a bloop, the line might resemble an upside down half-moon. By writing in let us say, “5-6,” we can deduce that the bloop fell into short leftfield, just beyond the reach of the third baseman and the shortstop. The blast then, with an “9” beside it, will reveal that the homerun was hit to right.

Some scorebooks have little “diamonds” inside the squares, which indicates the infield. A line drawn from the bottom of the diamond (home plate) up the right side, means that the player who hit the bloop single to short left, only made it as far as first base. But if the batter behind him hits a homer to right, the markings will indicate that he scored, too, as their corresponding “diamonds” are completely filled in. Which makes it easy to see who scored and in what inning.

Often, whenever a batter reaches base or even strikes out, the scorer might jot down that result in red. So, that by the time the game is completed, one’s scorebook is full of black marks, blue marks, or red marks such as “E5” (error third baseman), or a backwards “K” (the batter struck out looking at the pitch), or a “BB” (bases on balls).

The defensive players — from the pitcher’s mound, to home, to first, to second, to third, to short, to left, to center, and to right — are all assigned a number. The pitcher is “1”, catcher “2”, and so on. Thus, a “6-4-3” means that the batter has hit into a double play, which went from the shortstop, to the second baseman, and then onto first.

My scorebook also has spaces for the date the game was played, whether or not it was a day game or it was played at night, the name of the teams, what the time of the game was, and what was the attendance. Some books even allow for the game conditions — the direction of the wind, the temperature at game time, and whether or not the game was played under clear, rainy, or cloudy conditions.

When “read” at some later date, an entire game is recreated, done so from the symbols, scratches, marks, or “hieroglyphs” therein. An entire chronology of a player and his team throughout a season can be gleaned.

Long before I became a sportswriter, I became a prolific score keeper of baseball games. I was smitten so badly, that I’d sometimes feign illness so that I wouldn’t have to go to school. After all, the Dodgers were playing a game that day. I had it so bad, that the game, heard on radio only, might even have been an exhibition, played in Vero Beach, or in Fort Myers, Fla. The fact that the game didn’t count in the standings, meant nothing.

The announcers sounded as if they were calling the game from inside a closet or from inside a bathroom, so bad were the acoustics at a spring training field. Sometimes, the voices of the fans seemed as if they were emanating from inside the press box, too. Often they were, so close were the fans to the announcers. And because the sounds of the few thousand fans were minimal, I could often hear the unmistakable but soothing sound of wooden bat being dropped on another as the hitter moved from the on deck circle to the batter’s box. They all were the wonderful sounds of the coming of another baseball season.

All of it conjured up sunny, dreamy spring Florida days, augmented by the breezes off the nearby Atlantic Ocean, which brushed through the palms, and which I’d imagined ringed the small, wooden stadium.

And my scorebook? It resembled a mad mathematician’s journal, so chock full it was with seemingly every player from each of the 40-men spring training rosters. As pitcher-upon-pitcher entered the game, and as each pinch hitter or pinch runner or defensive player entered the game, there I was, diligently entering into my book, their comings and goings.

When the game was completed, I’d look at my cryptogram-filled scorebook one last time before closing it’s spirals, and I’d know I did a good day’s work of telling the story of a baseball game.

0 comments

1 Anonymous { 05.21.02 at 11:31 pm }

GREAT ARTICLE, AS AN OLD DODGER FAN WHO REMEMBERS DIXIE WALKER BACK IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF EBBETS FIELD, IT BRINGS BACK ALOT OF GOOD MEMORIES.

george kleinberg

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