Keeping score at a baseball game: An art form (2024)

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Scorekeeping and the box score have endured for years.

(Marc Bona, Northeast Ohio Media Group)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - I'm a dinosaur.

I keep score at baseball games, and I'm not paid to do it. In an age when every MLB scoreboard - and many minor-league ones, too - have a virtual Google's worth of stats, scores and biographical data flashing continuously, I sit hunched, penciling in my notations.

Many of those scribbles can be traced to Henry Chadwick, a 19^th century sportswriter and statistician who was born Oct. 5, 1824. Next week, scorers in major-league stadiums will follow in his work, jotting what will become the record of this year's postseason play.

Keeping score requires concentration, but it's calming, not stressful.

It's nice having a record. Not often, but occasionally I look back at previous books and programs. I'm always thinking I'll spot a player who went on to stardom, but I rarely find such a gem. (Though I did seeShea Hillenbrand play Class A ball in an ancient stadium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1996, his first professional year.)

Keeping score is an art form, and one I am far from perfect at performing. But satisfaction comes at watching a game unfold in the scrawled squares of a scorebook, like seeing the constant three up, three down in a masterful pitching performance. Or watching a team score most of its runs in one inning, a vertical wall of blackened ovals resembling a voter's ballot.

It's an interesting reference point that evolves over the course of a game and is a finished product at the moment of the last out. From it results a box score.

A scorekeeping primer: Certain symbols represent actions within the game. Each position on a diamond has a corresponding number (a pitcher is 1, catcher is 2, first baseman is 3, etc.) A 5-3 that is circled in a box means the batter grounded out: The third baseman threw to first for the out, which is shown by circling the numbers. Underlining the '3B' in a player's box that is subsequently filled in with a black oval or circle means that player hit a triple and then scored. Tallies at the bottom of each inning's column record total number of hits, run and players left on base. A separate area keeps track of pitchers.

A box score is not perfect. It doesn't have adjectives. You can't capture the emotions of the game or its nuances. How do you show a player's hustle, the fact he beat out an infield single on a close play?

And it can't capture minor leagues' minor leagueness. You wouldn't know, from looking at my book, that in a late-seasonAkron RubberDucks game, several of theRichmond Flying Squirrels were shown on the scoreboard with a picture of a squirrel replacing player mugshots. It doesn't show the wonderment on the face of a child mesmerized by mascot races, or the dismay on my face seeing my wife come back in the fourth inning with ketchup on her hot dog.

I don't try to track everything. No pitch counts, no ball-strike tallies.

I learned the importance of box scores when, as a college sports editor in the pre-Internet era, I faced an extremely tight news hole one day, which means there was little space for, well, much of anything. We usually ran several columns worth of major-league boxes, but on this particular day I ran none. The publisher greeted me the next morning with "Hey, what happened to the box scores? My phone has been ringing off the hook all morning."

That was the last time I didn't run box scores.

It takes a certain skill set at any level. Major-league scorekeepers earn $170 per game, are paid twice a year, and an annual meeting is held in New York. The RubberDucks in the Class AA Eastern League, by comparison, dole out $40 a game, and theLake County Captains of the Class A Midwest League pay about $50.

Many scorers use a pen. I don't have the guts. I keep an eraser handy.

There is room for personal interpretation within the structure. For instance, simply writing '9' on a player's at-bat would indicate he flied out to the right fielder. I prefer 'L9' or 'F9' to indicate whether it was a hard-hit line drive or a fly ball. If I draw a tiny star in a box marked 'F8' that indicates the centerfielder made a great play. I also draw a horizontal line between players to denote when a new pitcher comes in.

We have an Englishman to thank for many of these lines and notations.

It was Chadwick, who emigrated to the United States and essentially grew up with the game, who honed the box score. (What is believed to have been the first box score in a newspaper is dated to October 1845.) Its simple columns of information -- statistical lists, really -- have endured. What's amazing is its longevity. A box score's basic bones remain intact, though modifications have been made (credit USA Today andSabermetrics for much of this.)

A 2009 storyby Mike Pesca via npr.org calls Bill James, the statistical scrutinizer of the game, an "intellectual descendant" of Chadwick, writing that "James regards Chadwick much as Stephen Hawking looks at Copernicus."

Chadwick played rounders and cricket and, years later after he crossed the pond, he would write about the latter sport for the New York Times. He wasn't the first baseball writer but came of age as a writer when the nascent sport was taking root.

His biography authored by the Society for American Baseball Research lauds his pioneering work. In 1860 -- nine years before the sport saw its first professional team -- he was "editing Beadle's Dime Base-Ball Player, which he would make into the quintessential baseball guide. It was there that Chadwick developed the framework for the in-game scoring system that, while evolving somewhat over the years, has remained an enduring feature of baseball in the press box as well as among fans in the seats."

For his efforts, Chadwick is enshrined in theBaseball Hall of Fame - the only journalist in the hall.

For my efforts, I will simply keep my head down during baseball season, scribbling my own personal record of the game before me.