Baseball Hacks

Score a Baseball Game

This book shows you a lot of neat things you can do with computers and databases, but it’s important to remember that all of those numbers come from the same place: a person with a score sheet.

Many fans watch baseball passively, chatting with friends, sipping beer, and trying to make sense of the first base coach’s signals. But at any ballpark, you’ll find fans of all ages taking part in a ritual as old as baseball itself: keeping score.

Some people, like Yankees fan Nancy Smith, have kept score at every game for 40 years. “For some reason, the people I’ve met at the stadium over the years were fascinated by [my] keeping score,” she said in a New York Times article published June 1, 2005. “But I’m fascinated when I don’t see people keeping score; it’s a part of the game.”^[1]

This hack describes a popular method for keeping score. It uses the scorebooks sold at ballparks and gives a good visual record of everything that happened in a game. Even if you never plan to score a game yourself, knowing how a game is scored helps you understand where statistics come from.

Traditional Scoring

At a ballpark, most programs come with a score sheet for the game that resembles the score sheet in Figure 1-1 (from http://www.baseballscorecard.com/images/scorecard.gif). I’ve kept the description here a little vague because there are many variations on scoring methods. You’re welcome to include more or less information when you score a game or to record it differently.

The purpose ...