Keeping Score
Why do we do record the events of every ball game so meticulously? What do we measure and why? What is not measurable?
I offered this talk on Saturday, before the annual meeting of MLB’s official scorers, the most knowledgeable baseball crowd I have ever addressed. They were kind and indulgent, laughed at the lame jokes, and registered (or convincingly feigned) interest throughout. Why can an umpire invoke the infield fly rule for a ball ultimately caught by the left fielder? Has a runner nabbed at second base after taking off because a pitcher throws a ball in the dirt been caught stealing — only to find that the catcher, rather than blocking the ball, has snagged it on a bounce — or is he out on an unsuccessful attempt to advance? Only in Nerdville do such matters take on cosmic importance, but count me as a citizen in good standing of that place, and as one whose admiration for official scorers, in their refined thinking and love of the game, is boundless.
When you invite a historian to talk to official scorers about official scoring, the principal danger is not that he will bore you (that is a given) but that he will tell you what you already know, only in greater detail than you ever cared to know it. So let’s leave to one side who won Game 7 of the 2014 World Series, Madison Bumgarner or Jeremy Affeldt (I was in the pressbox, and know how the sausage was made!). Let me try instead to place into historical perspective the absolute, undeniable need for your close observation, your accumulated wisdom, and your informed judgment.
Now, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything we count, counts. Intangibles DO exist and, in baseball as in life, they count. But baseball is a game played by people who produce numbers that balance, more or less fairly in a box score — a run scored by one team is a run allowed by the other — in a way unmatched in “real life.” For nerds like me, that was and continues to be part of the game’s allure.
More than any other sport and perhaps more than any other human activity, baseball resides in memory, its events passed from generation to generation long before the advent of video or audio. Why? Because men and women like you, their identities not always known, have recorded the daily performance of players and teams in a largely uniform way.
Why do we keep score? Because victory is important even in simulated or sublimated combat, which in large measure is what sport is about. Why do we preserve records? As the tangible remains of games contested long ago, records transform play into an artifact of culture and thus the basis of a repeatable common experience — which is a fine way to describe a rite or ritual. To those who say baseball is unimportant, I say it is one of the central life experiences that binds us.
We have been publishing box scores since the mid-1840s. And we were keeping score in baseball long before that. Let me tell you a story, a sort of joke wherein I form the butt.
At the Hall of Fame some thirty years ago, the old library was cramped for space and pressed for cataloging services. Some large boxes were filled with unrelated items of mixed provenance and scant documentation. In one such box, packed loosely among some truly notable curios (I recall Cy Young’s rookie contract from 1890 and Christy Mathewson’s from 1899 … uncatalogued!) was a thin wooden stick, with irregular hand-hewn notches along part of its perhaps ten-inch length. With the unquestioning confidence that only comes with ignorance, I snorted at finding this insignificant piece of kindling, in a plastic bag without any indication that it had been cataloged as a gift to the Museum. “I know you’ll take anything here,” I laughingly announced to some library staffers, “but I thought at least it had to have something to do with baseball!”
All of us were puzzled by the stick, and none of us had an answer as to how it had entered into the collections or why it was being retained. I thought no more about the stick for the next five years, until I was reading through Henry Chadwick’s scrapbooks, on deposit at the New York Public Library … and then the stick became THE STICK. There, in Volume 20, which was dominated by cricket stories, I came upon the following innocuous note:
Previous to 1746, the score was kept by notches on a short lath: hence the term notches for runs. The notching-knife gradually gave way to the pen, and the thin stick to a sheet of foolscap.
The fool’s cap should have been placed on my head. I had dismissed as inconsequential what was surely a scorer’s stick from a very early game of baseball, an artifact perhaps most resonant of all items relating to the prehistory of the game as we know it. When the library was enlarged, the stick was lost or discarded.
How many of you have read (or written!) that Dunwoodie notched his 32nd homer of the season? Or that Rodriguez was knocked out of the box in the fourth frame? We haven’t scored with notches for nearly 200 years. The pitcher’s box disappeared in 1893. Innings are called frames because that is the way they came to be rendered on scoresheets and scorecards.
The undertow of the past is strong in baseball. And don’t get me started on the batter who is on deck with another in the hold, or the around-the-horn double play!
In 1857, for a match game between two different clubs (rather than an intramural contest), the rules provided for an umpire to be selected by the captains of the respective sides as well as “two scorers, one of whom shall be appointed by each of the contending clubs.” This is the first mention of a scorer in the rules. But there was no mention of a single official scorer for the game, named by the home club, until 1877. The rules governing the scorer were few, and I’d like to read some of them for you:
The first item in the tabulated score, after the player’s name and position, shall be the number of times he has been at bat during the game. Any time or times where the player has been sent to base on called balls shall not be included in this column.
In the second column should be set down the runs made by each player.
In the third column should be placed the first-base hits made by each player.
A base hit should be scored in the following cases:
When the ball from the bat strikes the ground between the foul lines and out of the reach of the fielders.
When a hit is partially or wholly stopped by a fielder in motion, but such player cannot recover himself in time to handle the ball before the striker reaches first base.
When the ball is hit so sharply to an infielder that he cannot handle it in time to put out a man.
In case of doubt over this class of hits, score a base hit and exempt the fielder from the charge of an error.
When a ball is hit so slowly toward a fielder that he cannot reach it before the batsman is safe.
Familiar, no?
Because official scorers were employed by the home teams, their impartiality was suspect. Box scores in different newspapers contained differing statistics. Batting championships hung in the balance — and not only because official sheets sent to the league office were sometimes misplaced or mistabulated for their year-end summations in the Guides.
In 1879 a civic-minded Chicago scorer provided Cap Anson with 20 extra hits in his report to the league office, unmatched by extra plate appearances, boosting his year-end batting average from .317 to .417, an error not caught for decades.
There are stories, scads of them. As an encyclopedist I can testify to the difficulties confronted by my forebears (Turkin-Thompson, Neft-Cohen, et al.), from the double-entry to Ty Cobb’s record in 1910 that cost Nap Lajoie a batting title to the ever-shifting victory totals for Cy Young and Walter Johnson. Those are great stories; if we had but world enough and time I would tell them — and the story of phantom ballplayers like “Proctor,” whom a Western Union telegrapher (probably of that name) entered in a box score as a prank, perplexing researchers for 80 years. But let me close out with one that is perhaps less well known.
On May 15, 1922, in a 4–1 Tiger win at New York‚ Ty Cobb beat out a grounder that shortstop Everett Scott bobbled. Fred Lieb scored it a hit in the box score he filed with the Associated Press. But official scorer John Kieran of the New York Times gave an error to Scott. At season’s end‚ American League official records‚ based on AP box scores‚ listed Cobb at .401. New York writers complained unsuccessfully‚ claiming it should have been .399‚ based on the official scoresheet. League president Ban Johnson went with the hit call that gave Cobb his third and final .400 season.
Thank you!
