Always before this I have avoided reading the sports pages. So
boring! In spite of our kids being avid baseball and football fans and most
being part of fantasy teams, I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for READING
about sports. But, with our baseball trip coming up in just a few months (our
first game will be in Phoenix at the Diamondbacks Chase Field against our
absolute favorite team, the San Francisco Giants on Opening Day!) I thought
that perhaps I should start trying to understand why the male half of the
population (and a few aberrant females) seems to not be able to start the day
without either reading the sports pages or watching some sport on tv or cell
phone.
So I am at least skimming the sports pages every morning (or
what passes for sports pages in the local paper, the Tucson Daily Star) and
even occasionally actually reading something therein. And I am starting to
think about scoring the baseball games.
For those of you who have no inkling of what it means to “score”
a baseball game, I present herewith a short description: One goes to a baseball
game with a “scorebook” in hand—or at least a small fanatical subset of fans
does—and pays rapt attention to each pitch (because you have to note, if not
every pitch, at least every time a player is “at bat” and what he does during
that time at bat) because you have to write in, for every at bat, a notation
such as “K” (strikeout swinging—there is a symbol for a strikeout looking, but
I can’t find it on my computer, a backwards K), “1B” (single), “2B” (double), “6-4”
(grounded out to the shortstop), etc. Should your attention wander for so much
as a moment, it is guaranteed that you will have missed what will be the
absolute best play of the game and you will have no idea who caught the ball
(was it the shortstop [6] or the 2nd baseman [4]?), whether there
was an error and who made it (e8 or e9?), or was the batter hit by a pitch (HBP).
For anybody who doesn’t love baseball, “scoring” a game sounds, well, even more
boring than the game itself if that is possible. But if you love baseball,
scoring a game makes the game just that much more interesting! And baseball IS
interesting. There is something going on every minute of the game!
Anyway, I am researching scorebooks. I had no idea there
were so many! There is the scorebook at ilovetoscore.com; the Rawlings Deluxe
System-17 Baseball and Softball Scorebook (only $7.95 plus tax and shipping)
not to mentions the Rawlings Basic System-17 Baseball and Softball
Scorebook (at $8.95 plus tax and shipping)—no idea why the Basic is more
expensive than the Deluxe. There are some with room for up to 15 innings per
game and some with only room for 9 innings per game. Some have 30 games per
book, some have 100 or 25 or 15. The mind boggles at the choices available. And
of course we could just buy the program at each game and use that! But then we’d
have to buy two programs since we both want to score the games. But, as somebody pointed out, these are often printed on
shiny paper and it’s very difficult if not impossible to score on that kind of
paper with a pencil. Nobody scores with a pen. Or at least, I don’t.
I may have found the (almost) ideal scorebook from a small
company called Eephus League of Baseball Minutiae which offers The Halfliner.
It’s a bit big (it can hold scoring for 81 games, we’ll only [only!] see 30) while
at the same time being a bit small (only 7.5" x 9.75"). www.eephusleague.com
The search goes on.
