10 Mar 2011, by Eric
Alex Belth is a friend of P&P and one of baseball's longest-tenured bloggers. Check out his cultural and baseball musings -- and work from his stable of talented writers -- over at Bronx Banter.
I didn't start keeping score until I was in my Thirties. As a kid, I never had the patience. It's true that I didn't have anyone teach me how to score but my attention was also too scattered for that kind of thing. Occasionally, I would give it a try, because I was envious of my friends who did score games. But it never lasted more than a few innings.
Eventually, I kept a scorecard when I went to Yankee games, using a hybrid of official notations and my own system, which varied from game to game. I've always envied those scorebooks with neat, clear handwriting; I'm way too emotional for that.I like the graphic quality of it and look at it like I'm making a collage (I've always envied those scorebooks with neat, clear handwriting; I'm way too emotional for that.) I'm generally a nervous, uptight fan and I discovered that scoring gives me a way to channel my energy and keep me focused on the game. It's almost like knitting. I sit there, clicking on my pen, rolling the corners of the pages, rocking like Leo Mazzone, scribbling little notes, entertaining myself.
These days, you don't need to score to know what's going on, the scoreboards and your cellphones can give you all that information and more, but still, I find it a soothing practice. But I only score at Yankee games. If I'm watching the Mets, and the game doesn't matter to me emotionally, I'll revert back to being a kid, keeping score for a few innings before I get distracted.
I like to think that keeping a scorebook will give me something to enjoy looking back on when I'm old. I rarely revisit them but I don't throw them out either.
Alex uses the books from ILovetoScore.com, which were designed by a frustrated fan looking for a better way. Kind of a precurser to Bethany Heck's work and definitely worth checking out, if you're into thoughtfully designed scorebooks.
09 Mar 2011, by Ted
"You gotta keep score," broadcaster Dave Sims told me over the phone. "I don't know anyone in this business who doesn't keep score."
Even early in my conversation with the Seattle Mariners play-by-play veteran, I understand the depth to which this professional broadcaster associates calling a big league baseball game with scoring it. Sims can barely conceive of succeeding at the former without doing the latter.
It isn't long, either, before a discussion of the broader practice of scorekeeping gives way to the concrete, and I can hear the rustle of looseleaf paper as Sims shuffles through his scorecard from the Mariners-Dbacks game he called earlier in the day. Highly touted Seattle prospect Dustin Ackley's day at the plate catches his eye.
"Let's see," says Sims, "Ackley walked on four pitches and he hit a double. In my mind's eye I can see it, and I have it marked down right here. Keeping score helps you tell the story of the ballgame."
Sims paused, as his scorecard revealed another storyline. "The Mariners were set down ten in a row to start the game,” he said with the same emotion he probably infused the live broadcast with. “Heck, they didn't have a base hit until the fifth, a seeing eye single by Michael Saunders past the right side."
He can't seem to help but to recount the afternoon. It's as if, scanning his scorecard, the game is replaying itself before his eyes. Give him enough time and one starts to feel that he could extract a week's worth of stories from the ticks, digits, and colors on his scorecard.
A broadcaster's job is to describe the game with the accuracy of a reporter and the narrative fluidity of a novelist. Like a reporter, Dave Sims takes very good notes, and, like a novelist, he knows how to interpret and translate these notes into a cohesive narrative. Through the relentless use of his scorecard, Sims turns a plot into a story, and he does it in real time.
Through the relentless use of his scorecard, Sims turns a plot into a story, and he does it in real time.
Sims learned to score from his father at a young age, around six or seven years old, and he found keeping the book a match for his personality. "I've kept score all my life," he tells me. "If you're a baseball fan, you tend to be anal retentive anyway. Scorekeeping just reinforces it to the nth degree."
"For example," he continues, "I'm very anal about keeping pitch counts. Today, I was watching the Mariners and the Diamondbacks, and it's interesting to see what guys are swinging at. Keeping a good pitch count, I can look down at my book and see that Langerhans swung at the first pitch the first time up and the second time up he took it deep in the count.
"I keep balls and strikes. I keep a pitch count up in the upper right hand corner of the box because it can give you an insight into how a hitter's doing."
Dave Sims' scorebook is a living text. He uses it constantly while broadcasting, moving from the live game situation to the evolving text and back again like an air traffic controller with a radar screen. The scorebook is an irreplaceable key to the practice of broadcasting, and crucial for tracking the through-lines of the game as they play out from the first pitch to the last. Sims’ scorebook, in other words, is not a document composed for historical posterity, but a tool of the immediate world, as crucial to his work as a computer screen to a programmer.
(Speaking of technology, I ask him if he ever uses the Internet during a game. "When I’m broadcasting, I don't have time to be fumbling around checking the Internet," he assures me, “but I can go right to my book. You’re seeing more iPads used for some stuff, but I’m not there yet.”)
Sims’ scoring system, which I’ll readily admit was a bit hard for me to grasp in its finer details over the phone, places a premium on the most important narrative fact in a given inning: outs. “The great Bob Wolff told me never to forget the number of outs in the inning,” says Sims. Next up is the need to identify how a hit was made, and Sims logs where the ball was batted to alongside the traditional numbers. What that likely means, I’d guess, is a few more strokes of the pen than the average fan invests, to show a long fly ball or a weak grounder. And a home run, for example, gets an ‘X’ to mark the spot over the fence where it left the yard.
Sims also uses four color-coded highlighters to mark important turns of event. A play marked with a pink highlighter signals that a run was driven in, green means a strikeout, blue a walk, and yellow means that it was an unusual play of some kind (one can imagine a yellow streak highlighting yet another gravity defying catch from Franklin “Death to Flying Things” Gutierrez, or yet another 200th hit of the year from Ichiro). "When I look down at my book,” Sims says, “my eye jumps right to the color. It's all very visual."
During Spring Training, when a scorebook can take on the convoluted air of an Enron accounting ledger, Sims marks the starters in black or blue pen (the foundational color is arbitrary based on whatever pen is at hand that day), and the reserves go down in red. He maintains the scorecard just as he would any other broadcast, from each Single-A at bat on down to every last dizzying high-numbered roster manipulation.
“If I'm on the air, I can't just say, ‘here is some guy.’”
During the regular season, Sims' scorebook is an oversized ledger with space for a hundred or so games. His book is not as cumbersome as the one used by the late Mariners icon Dave Niehaus, the heft of which, Sims noted, "was enough to give you a hernia." Sims' saves his big scorebooks, and his archives go back years. He can look to his own library to find the results of a game from years gone by.
His book is not as cumbersome as the one used by the late Mariners icon Dave Niehaus, the heft of which, Sims noted, "was enough to give you a hernia."
Whereas, in basketball and football broadcasting, of which Sims has done a ton, there is more reliance on producers for up-to-the-second game information, in baseball, Sims does much of his own tracking, creating his primary reference materials as the events themselves occur. It’s a triangle of action: he watches it, he marks it down, and he talks about it. See, write, talk, see, write, talk. One corner of the triangle informs the other as the space between them gains texture. The past informs the present.
The broadcaster, in completing this three-pronged action, does what the fan himself or herself does, seeing and marking, reacting and learning. When I score a game myself, I feel more confident in discussing the finer points, having at my disposal a reference document that corresponds directly to the facts of the matter. I can argue for a player’s performance because I have equipped myself with information. The insight that a scorecard proffers is distinctly democratic, and the broadcaster who keeps his own score is only trumpeting the fact that what he is doing every fan can also do, albeit without the salary. Every fan owns his or her own story.
"It's a multitasking job, particularly in TV," says Sims of scoring and calling a game while throwing cues to fellow broadcasters and sideline reporters and coming in and out of breaks. "But it's what I've trained all my life to do, and I love it."
Images courtesy of Dave Sims.
08 Mar 2011, by Ted
If there is a more comprehensive baseball scorekeeping site than The Baseball Scorecard, it would be an impressively comprehensive baseball scorekeeping site.
The Art of Manliness offers its own tutorial on scorekeeping. I enjoyed the emphasis on creating your own style, but I would've included more about how to score the way Hemingway did.
Keeping score makes Rob Neyer happy, and that makes us happy.
At the bottom of this Keith Olbermann post about Bryce Harper and Spring Training, there's a lovely picture of a pin-neat scorecard.
The Joy of Keeping Score by Paul Dickson.
Roger Angell with a sentence on scoring Roy Halladay's historic playoff no-hitter:
"Even from a distance, at home again in your squalid living-room loge, you felt something special this time about the flow of pitches, balls and (mostly) strikes, the inexorably approaching twenty-seventh man retired, and, if you happened to be keeping score, the pleasingly staggered, vertically accumulating triads of outs."
Bethany Heck, who we interviewed, wrote a post about her project over at NotGraphs.
MLB has a little Baseball Basics page on keeping score, and I have to say that the method is a little bizarre.
[caption id="attachment_2454" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="image via Flickr user Tom Lee"]
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08 Mar 2011, by Eric
Our first guest contributor for scorebook week is Patrick Truby, of There's No I in Blog. Welcome aboard, Pat.
I’ve always admired neatly kept scorebooks because I’ve never understood them. The act of neatly scoring a complete baseball game seems like an impossible task for someone like me, who is equal parts obsessive-compulsive disorder and messy doodler. That doesn’t make a ton of sense, I know, but no matter how hard I try to be neat and ordered, it’s impossible for me to hold a pencil and paper without turning even the neatest, most organized piece of paper into a splatter of Jolly Rogers and manturtles. This created a ridiculous amount of anxiety when, back in my ball playing days, the task of keeping my team scorebook became my responsibility.
On a few of my teams, bench players rotated scoring the games. Something about using the scorekeeping codes—the lines, colored squares, and backward “K”s—to create a readable account of the game on that grid pattern of boxes and baseball diamonds carried more pressure than a late-inning at-bat with runners in scoring position. I knew eventually I’d make a mess of it all. I doubt even now that I could accurately score a baseball game; basic things, like how to signify that an inning has ended or a player has been substituted, were never important to me. Instead, I got bogged down in the more artistic details.
By far the most important aspect of keeping score for me was creating the most accurate description of how hard and where a ball was hit. Anyone could write “1B” to signify a single. I was more obsessed with depicting how exactly a batter achieved that single. There’s the saying that a swinging-bunt single is a line drive in a score book, but not in my scorebook. I attempted to draw the line to the exact point on the field where a batted ball was fielded. For that swinging-bunt single, I’d have drawn a very light line extending barely past home plate. A fly out near the outfield fence was just as easy. I needed to get the arc of the ball perfect, but that line would no doubt go just to the edge of the scorebook’s outfield line. A line drive hit to left-center might be more difficult. I’d have to find the exact spot where the ball landed on the field and the corresponding spot in the book’s scaled down field. Try as I might, I could never get it down to an exact science. If that line drive to left-center landed behind the shortstop, found a gap, and rolled to the outfield wall, I would be bothered for the rest of the game that I my little baseball pictogram gave the impression that a batter got a triple off a hit that landed in short-left.
In retrospect, my attention to that specific detail may have caused my scorebook doodling. I thought it kept me focused on both the game and the paper before me when really, my inability to draw the perfect lines caused hours of frustration. As games went on, my inner perfectionist would give way to my inner doodler. Lines wavered. Boxes got sloppy. To look at my scorebook, you’d imagine some kind of baseball catastrophe broke out in the sixth inning. I can’t think of words to accurately describe how my doodles ruined a perfectly good scorebook except that, if any of my teammates went back and looked at one of the pages I scored, they’d probably think they were looking at a documentation of the rain and lightning delay that sent both teams to the equipment room for a few hours.
*Photo courtesy of Jenny Ryan
07 Mar 2011, by Eric
Bethany Heck is the impetus for scorekeeping week. She is a graphic designer whose Eephus League Baseball Scorebook Revival project on Kickstarter, seeking funds to help produce a reimagined and better-designed baseball scorebook, has bounced around the baseball blogosphere for a couple weeks. It even captured the disconnected and rarely timely imaginations of Ted and myself. She is also behind the Eephus League, an online repository of stylish baseball artifacts. Bethany and I discussed scorekeeping in terms of baseball fandom, and her own unique project.
Eric: Tell us about your website, the Eephus League. It’s stunning full of great design, great images, great everything. But what exactly is it? I don’t even know where to start.
Bethany: Well, it is a hard thing to describe, isn’t it? It’s about everything and nothing. It’s a safe haven for all the random things that occur in and because of baseball. There were so many things about baseball that I loved, but no one site to house them all, and none of them allowed user participation either. So I made the Eephus League to fill that selfish desire!
Eric: So out of a clearing house full of marginalia, novelty items, and other disconnected treasures comes an ambitious, artistic, and clearly very popular mission to redesign and essentially restart the baseball scorebook?
I look at today’s scorecards, with 50 subdivisions per batter, per inning, and well... it’s not fun. It’s not inviting.Bethany: Yes. Scorekeeping has always been something that interested me from a record keeping and visual standpoint, and I love looking back at older scorebook designs. They were so much simpler, and you can see why more people kept score back then. Then I look at today’s scorecards, with 50 subdivisions per batter, per inning, and well... it’s not fun. It’s not inviting. And come on, those books are hideous. I wanted something that would make not only scorekeeping, but baseball cool again.
Eric: When and how did you learn how to keep score? Was it love at first filled-in diamond?
Bethany: I wish I had a romantic story about my first experience, but it was at Fulton County Stadium with my father, I was probably 7 years old, and after getting t shirts, pennants, and a duffle bag at the gate, we sat down and he pointed out the scorecard to me, explained a few things. I didn’t keep it up for long, but that was my first experience. I did it off and on until I started working on the Eephus League last summer.
Eric: Were there any particular scorebooks that influenced you? Or even non-baseball material, as you came up with the aesthetics for your own? Ted said they reminded him on the outside of moleskine notebooks.
Bethany: Well Ted is definitely correct about the influence of Moleskine sketchbooks. Once I decided that I was going to make scorebooks, I looked at the different sketchbooks on the market and Moleskines were my favorite. I used that as a size basis and for things like the flap in the back to hold extra materials. The question I asked myself was “if Moleskine made a scorebook, what would it look like?” There are some older scorecards that were pocket sized that were especially inspirational. Teeny tiny grids and limited columns, and you realize that scorekeeping only has to be as space-consuming as you want it to be.
Eric: Why scorekeeping in particular -- why should the masses be taking it up? And what’s lost when we don’t keep score by hand?
Bethany: Why doesn’t everyone keep score? Baseball is a relaxed game, it’s mostly downtime, and scorekeeping is a great way to fill the empty spaces. To start over, I focused on scorekeeping because I think it’s an incredible art that’s dying. It’s rare that you see someone keeping score at a game, and the ones you do see are mostly older folks. And the current scorebook designs are not something you can just plop in a teenagers lap and say “hey, have at it!”
Eric: Speaking of the artistic aspect, I remember playing high school baseball, and one of our coaches had this palm pilot-y electronic thing we had to use to keep score. It was so embarrassing to sit in the dugout and punch numbers on it with the little stylus like some sort of lost field engineer. Then again, I had terrible hand-writing. So I guess it was fine in that respect.
Bethany: That’s rough. Scorekeeping needs to be done by hand, in my opinion, or with some sort of calligraphic input. It’s like a secret language that is passed along, and everyone adds their own little bits to the vernacular.
Eric: Are there any especially awesome or unique flourishes you’ve come across? Any odd bits of slang?
Bethany: There are so many! I heard recently from an Eephus League member who draws a line past first to indicate a single, and the line stop at the base for a walk. Things like using an exclamation point to note an exceptional play on the field are great. Some people use dots to indicate balls thrown, slashes for swinging strikes, and so on. I love that stuff.
Scorekeeping is storytelling, at its heart.Eric: What is it about visual design that can elicit that kind of expression? What I mean is, why does your version of the scorebook allow for people to keep score artistically, while another version makes for a dull coding experience. Is it simply space?
Bethany: I think it has to do with the overall presentation of the page. I was careful to keep generous margins and to have minimal extra content in the grid. When you add that stuff, you’re almost telling someone how to score. “Put this here.” I hope my design encourages more freedom of expression.
Eric: How can scorekeeping be a social act, an act of sharing and community?
Bethany: I think any time you’ve got a group of people together keeping score, you’re going to have an exchange of technique. “How did you score that? Hey, what do the dashes mean?” I also want to add a section to the Eephus League site that chronicles different notation techniques. You might come across something that makes perfect sense to you and decide to use it or adapt it for your own use. I also love seeing completed scorecards that other people have kept, so that is a very social thing for me. Scorekeeping is storytelling, at its heart.
Eric: How has the reception been so far for the scorebook project? As of now, you’re well past your Kickstarter goal.
Bethany: The reception has been far better than I could have hoped for. When I started the project, a friend saw the amount I was aiming for and was extremely doubtful that I’d make it. I sold over 530 scorebooks through pre-orders in a week, and it’s not even baseball season yet. I’m so overwhelmed. People say they are going to use it for their first scorebook, which is so exciting for me.
Eric: What are you doing about production? I imagine you aren’t handcrafting all 530 before Opening Day...or are you?
Bethany: Hah, thankfully I don’t have to. I have a local printer who is going to print all of the books. The only sacrifice I had to make was the stitching down the side. It’s going to be stapled 3 times instead. It won’t hurt the function of the book, thankfully, it will still be plenty sturdy. I do have to make the bands for the outside and the reference cards all myself, so that’s going to be fun.
Eric: Why Kickstarter? In retrospect, it was obviously a great decision, but did you know that this was the kind of project that could kick up grassroots support? Or was it more of a “what the hell, let’s see what happens” kind of thing?
Bethany: Definitely more of the latter. I knew I had a large amount of money that was going to be required to get the books made, and I really didn’t have a good feel for how many I should be producing. Kickstarter was a chance to solve both problems. When I submitted the project, I didn’t expect them to accept me.
Eric: I didn’t realize it was a competitive thing -- I thought anybody could get on there within reason, and then the people spoke for themselves. So you had to sell Kickstarter on this idea?
Bethany: In a way, yes. You tell them about the project, how much you want to raise, etc. They have certain restrictions about what you can and can’t raise money for.
Eric: So what’s next? I imagine you will be taking this project beyond Kickstarter, and maybe even perhaps the initial scorebook offering?
Bethany: Well, the end goal is to get MLB licensing and to offer books with the correct colors for every team, team logos on the book, and seating charts in the pages where you can draw in where you sat. But for now, I’ve got to sell a lot more scorebooks!
As of this writing, Bethany has just about doubled her fundraising goal of $10,000, but if you want, you can still donate -- and lay claim to your very own Eephus League merchandise, over at Kickstarter.