The Body Keeps the Score
As with listening to baseball on the radio, keeping score as a fan is an attempt to maintain connection with the traditions of the game. Practitioners of this ancient art will say they tote their pens and books to the ballpark because it helps them remain focused on the action, provides them with a homemade souvenir of games they’ve attended, or simply gives them something to do with their hands once they’ve run out of peanuts.
Me? I do it for clout. I roll up to the bleachers with my gorgeous Eephus League scorebook, casually start my tally, and wait for the admiring questions to roll in. Do you always keep score? How’d you learn to do that? Wow, you’re doing it in pen? Of course, the first time I admitted this perverse habit to my girlfriend, she astutely asked: don’t they already have someone keeping score?
Well, yeah. The Official Scorer lurks in the press box, issuing decisions like the shadowy Banker from Deal or No Deal. Some amateur scorekeepers view the Scorer as their competition and argue vociferously over hits and errors from their 300-level vantage point. I like my scorebook to match the official record, and I’m usually distracted by a low-passing seagull when a close play happens, so I tend to go along with the official ruling (or reference ESPN to fill in the blanks when I’ve spent an entire inning in the beer line).
So for the idea that scorekeeping helps me pay closer attention to the game, I’m not entirely convinced. Where it is helpful, I think, is in understanding the shape of a pitcher’s outing. The structure of the scoresheet makes long innings easy to see, and a messy line full of tickmarks and annotations highlights when there was traffic on the bases. The scorebook also conveniently doubles as a hat when it’s sunny out.
Though there was no one around to apportion clout, I kept score while watching today’s game from home. A 12:45 Wednesday start with nothing else on the calendar seemed as good an occasion as any to bust out the scorebook for the first time this season.
So what does today’s line tell us?
The Mets were in San Francisco, hoping to avoid a sweep in this three-game set. Sean Manaea, who pitched for the Giant last season, returned to Oracle Park without his formerly glorious hair and set about exacting revenge against his former team. After striking out in order in the first inning, the Giants committed an ignominious NOBLETIGER1 in the second. In this way they set the tone for the game, repeatedly getting runners on base and failing to drive them in. It was the perfect sort of game to watch with pen in hand—rather slow and boring, and without too many complicated putouts to record.
The Mets, meanwhile, put pressure on the SF bullpen in nearly every inning, scoring six runs in the middle innings to put the game out of reach. I committed a rookie scorer’s error in the bottom of the fifth, prematurely recording an apparent hit-by-pitch on Michael Conforto, only to have to scratch out my markings when video review overturned the call. Conforto instead struck out. And while utilityman Tyler Fitzgerald got the Giants off the schneid with a home run in the 7th, my scoresheet, as mine often do, goes cold here.
This, truly, is the appeal of keeping score at home. Where as the Official Scorer is bound to toil over his scoresheet into the late innings of hopeless contests, I have the liberty to pack up my toys and go do something else. And so I turned off the game and went to pet my cats. Score: Me 1, Sports 0.
A NOBLETIGER is a wonderful baseball neologism created by the Detroit Tigers subreddit, short for No Outs Bases Loaded Ending with Team Incapable of Getting Easy Run. The similarly delightful TOOTBLAN (Thrown Out On The Bases Like A Nincompoop) has even been enshrined in the official MLB dictionary.