Baseball Hacks

Keep Score, Project Scoresheet–Style

Use the Project Scoresheet system to record the plays during a baseball game.

About 20 years ago, a group of baseball fans started Project Scoresheet. This was a collaborative effort by baseball fans to record every play of every game. Bill James started this project out of frustration because the Elias Sports Bureau (the official statistics provider) refused to make this data available to fans. So, in true hacker tradition, the members of the project designed a neat, simple scoring method that was perfect for describing plays to computers. Today this system lives on as the preferred encoding method of Retrosheet. In fact, it’s even used by STATS, Inc. and the Elias Sports Bureau.

With Project Scoresheet record keeping, you write down a code each time something happens during the game, in chronological order. You don’t need two score sheets (one for each team) or special scoring paper. Even better, you don’t need to use any weird symbols—you can just write codes using the letters of the alphabet. This makes Project Scoresheet descriptions ideal for computer use because they’re easy to enter, email, and save to a database. The disadvantage of this system is that it’s a little tough to compute a box score by hand or manually read a game description. After you get the hang of this system (and you learn all the codes, which admittedly is a big hurdle), you may find it faster and easier than traditional scoring.

Even if you never plan to use this system, ...