Everly Park, Macomb, Illinois (The importance of keeping a scorecard)

 

We keep a detailed scorecard at every game we go to. Actually, it’s my obsession, but when I step out to go buy something, Kerry knows exactly how to do it. And if I do step out, it’s not uncommon for someone nearby to lean over to Kerry and ask if I’m a scout or an official scorer or something. I’m not, of course, but I take it as a compliment. I don’t keep score because I’m paid to, I do it because it helps me focus on the game, and provides a way that I can go back later (even years later) and reconstruct what happened. Quite a few fans keep scorecards, at various levels of detail.

The only time I was ever an actual official, paid scorekeeper was for the area men’s fast-pitch softball league in Macomb, when I was in middle school and the regular scorekeeper was gone for two weeks. Exactly how I got the gig, I don’t remember, but I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the games. It was the days before slo-pitch softball became popular, so adults played fast-pitch, and though Macomb was a small town of about 15,000 people, it was one of the better leagues around, with the best teams going far in the state tournament. Everly Park was the home park, and a softball park worked for the upper-level kids’ baseball leagues, so I got to play there, too. I’d still swear that 3-2 pitch I threw with the game tied and the bases loaded in the bottom of the last inning that one evening was a strike, but that’s another story. The park’s still there, and we stayed near there while attending my high school reunion.

I don’t know when I started keeping score at games, but I know I was doing it by the time I was 10 years old. That summer, 1965, my family went to Rochester, Minnesota for a week for my father to have a checkup for a medical issue at the Mayo Clinic. The hotel we were staying at had one TV, in the lobby, and every evening, they’d show the Twins game. And there would be a sizeable group of Twins fans watching the game. The Twins were good that year, and ended up going to the World Series for the first time since moving from Washington five years earlier, so they were fun games to watch in Minnesota.  I remember watching those games, but what I didn’t know until years later was that the first evening I went down to the lobby, my dad followed surreptitiously a little while later, just to make sure I was OK among all these older adults. He saw them asking me regularly about what a particular player had done in a particular at-bat. Whether they were doing it because they really wanted to know, or whether they were just humoring the serious little kid, I don’t know, but it’s a good memory (and his check-up was good news).

As I got older, I always kept a scorecard, and as we started going to lots of games, I started buying scorebooks at the sporting goods stores. But they never had exactly what I wanted, so ultimately, I ended up making my own, punching holes in them, and getting a binder that folds back on itself.

There’s a standard shorthand to scorebooks, and most of it goes back to a 19^th Century sportswriter, Henry Chadwick. He’s the one who gave every fielder a number (1=pitcher, 2=catcher, 3=1^st baseman, 4=2^nd baseman, 5=3^rd baseman, 6=shortstop, 7=leftfielder, 8=centerfielder, 9=rightfielder), and came up with “K” as the symbol for a strike out.

I think that anyone who keeps score long enough ends up with certain quirks of their own (using colors isn’t uncommon, but there’s not a standardized system, for example), so no two scorecards will be identical, but they’ll be very close. If the batter hits a ground ball to the shortstop, who throws him out at first, it may be “6-3” or “63”, but we’ll all know what it means, if we can read each other’s handwriting. And anyone who has kept a scorecard knows that a double play, shortstop to second base to first, is “6-4-3” –T-shirts that say “6+4+3=2” are a staple at baseball-oriented gift shops. My personal scorecard also has places for our guesses of the attendance (only at Chase), for our ratings of the national anthem, and space for notes to explain strange plays.

What do I do with them after the game?

Keep them, of course. I’ve got years’ worth of scorecards, and I do occasionally go back to try to find what happened in a particular game. Ultimately, they will be one more thing our children will have to deal with, but I trust they’ll have the good sense to get rid of them without a second thought. It was just my way of watching a game.