Baseball Musings: Keeping Score

July 11, 2008

Keeping Score

The Los Angeles Times publishes a story on how scorekeeping fans are disappearing. However, this quote surprised me:

Eisenberg has embraced a time-honored task that requires a fan to pay reasonably close attention to an entire game -- in an era when the stadium-going experience is full of reasons not to. There are long lines at the bathroom or the beer stand, distractions on the scoreboard and in the stands, and, at least among Dodgers fans, a long-standing tradition of leaving early.
And the attentiveness requirement isn't the only impediment. There's always the danger of ridicule.

"People laugh at me, and they look at me really strange and they say, 'Why do you keep score? What are you going to do with that?' " said South Pasadena resident Kelly Wallace, who keeps score at approximately 30 Dodgers games a season.

When I attended game regularly, I always kept score. Some people would ask what I was doing, but they were always interested, not condescending. Often, people would ask what happened earlier in the game. I actually became a resource for the fans around me.

Posted by David Pinto at 07:41 AM | Fans | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Dave:

Your experience matches mine, too. Most people know what I am doing and soon start asking info from the score book.

I was at yesterday's Phillies game with my young son, so no scorebook for me and none were in sight in our section.

I started keeping score as the official scorer for my older brother's Strat-o-matic league. Then we all kept score once I got my Strat franchise.

Keeping score is a dying, but essential part of the game.

I coach in the lower divisions of Little League and I'm frequently amazed at how bad the other team's scorebook is kept. We've had questions come up in-game, you confer with the other coach and his book has his defensive rotation and maybe some tally marks for the score.

Posted by: Joe in Philly at July 11, 2008 07:58 AM

I was keeping score at a minor league game one time, and the woman sitting next to me asked if I was a scout or something.

But yeah, more often than not when someone mentions on it, it's to ask what a guy did last time up.

Posted by: DXMachina at July 11, 2008 09:12 AM

I eventually had to by my own scorebook because the Houston Astros decided to eliminate all spaces associated with the pitchers on the scorecards they sold at the park. And even with that, keeping score at Minute Maid Park can be a big guessing game as they often don't note on the scoreboard who made an error, or whether there was a passed ball or a wild pitch.

I don't think most people notice or care about what I'm doing. But of those that do, I get lots of questions about what happened with certain batters or how outs were made. But it does often feel like I'm the only one but the official scorer keeping score in the whole stadium.

Posted by: John Royal at July 11, 2008 10:35 AM

Interesting comment fro John R - the crappy, wholly inadequate scorecards that you pay for are a pet peeve of mine. Also, John, you miss the point of scorekeeping - YOU get to decide if a play is an error, by whom, etc... You are no longer dependent on the homer scorers who clearly have no objectivity when deciding these things.

Posted by: Phil at July 11, 2008 11:16 AM

I've been following baseball for ten years now here in Britain and I've found keeping score to be an essential way to learn about the sport. Clearly it helps you understand the rules of the game (when does a player get an RBI? etc), but its great benefit is that it makes you think about what's taking place on the field, rather than just sitting back and watching it go by. This allows you to learn more about the strategic side of the game and just generally appeciate it even more.

I'm a big fan of keeping score and I encourage any Brits who show an interest in the sport (which doesn't happen too often, if I'm honest!) to take it up. Recently I've started using Alex Reisner's 'situational' scoring system, which is a good variation on the standard way of aproaching keeping score.

Posted by: Matt Smith at July 11, 2008 12:56 PM

I keep score, as does my son. I find a nice community of those who keep score or who have develops at the park. I did once encounter drunken fans who took exception to something I had said and then proceeded the rest of the game to taunt my son as a geek for scoring the game.

I thought the lede of the LA Times story amusing. It spoke of how scoring is obsolete in the era where you can get the score of any game from your cell phone. But of course if you are scoring the game, you are already there, and hardly need your cell phone.

Posted by: Capybara at July 11, 2008 02:52 PM

To me, the value of "score-keeping" is that, 15 years later, you have a record of what happened -- in your own words. When i was a kid, going to a ball game was something special, a once-a-year thing at best (my family was not well off and we lived far from the city).

Sure, you can look it up on retrosheet, maybe, if you can remember the date, but having a card that shows how tommy herr hit a double to drive in Ozzy from first to help beat the mets (in my father's heavy handwriting) is the most awesome piece of memorabilia ever. I can only hope I have the opportunity to share such things with my own children some day.

Posted by: SleepyCA at July 12, 2008 03:33 AM

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