When I was three
years old, my father brought me to my first sporting event, a baseball game at
Fenway Park. Since then, I have considered the 100-year-old stadium a home away
from home. I always enter with my scorebook in hand as one of the 37,000 eager fans
ready for an entertaining day of baseball. When I began to start reading and
writing, my dad showed me how to “keep score” of baseball games. The art of
keeping score is something that is done by the most diehard baseball fans,
those who are interested in every single play of each game.
As seen in the
picture below, I kept score of the September 19th game between the
Houston Astros and the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium. The image is of
the statistics regarding the Cardinals pitching and Astros hitting. In
addition, the names of pitchers who won (“WP”), lost (“LP”) and saved (“SV”)
the game are found in the top right. Below the pitching summary, there is some
more general information: the time, attendance and weather. In this
mid-September evening game, the Cardinals stifled the Astros batters. Houston could
only muster five hits as a team and had just eight baserunners in total. Since
the Astros hitting was so weak that night, their side of the scorecard is
fairly clean. They only had one substitution that game when backup catcher
Jason Castro pinch-hit in the eighth inning. This side of the scorecard gives
many indications that Houston struggled to hit in this game. The line score at
the top of the page can quickly provide their inning-by-inning scoring as well
their overall team runs (“R”), hits (“H”), errors (“E”) and men left on base
(“LOB”). However, I prefer the inning-by-inning summary at the bottom of the
page that displays the runs, hits, errors and men left on base for each inning
because it allows the reader to understand how the team performed in each frame.
I just explained
the gist of keeping score, but there are many intricacies, symbols and
abbreviations that are involved in scoring a baseball game. I continue to try
to keep score at every game that I attend because it is so enjoyable. This is
my second scorebook and I anticipate getting a third soon since the current one
is almost all filled with fantastic baseball memories.
Was scrolling randomly through the posts. Saw an image. Thought to myself, "well that's interesting... a lab notebook..." Looked a bit more carefully. Wait, that's..not a lab notebook?
ReplyDeleteHaving only been to a few baseball games (go Cubs!) and never having used a scorebook, it was really surprising how exotic and strange the image was. It's filled with scribbles of names and random terminology (why are there backwards "K"s?) In many ways, the scorecard is kind of similar to a lab notebook. It records observations in a very specific setting, focusing on details, and records them in a systematic fashion. Only people in the field can reasonably interpret the information and holds value only to very specific individuals.
Anyways, it was interesting to feel what it was like being on the "other side." Since I've been around science for most of my life, lab notebooks were so common for me. The scorebook, however, was so foreign, yet the principles regulating both their functions are so similar.