Make money keeping score baseball

Scoring leaves a personal record of the game. If I ever need to know what happened in some game, I can look up the results, or even the box score. The long innings stretch out on the card, my chess-style notes next to great plays and weird manager decisions to revisit later. Sore scorer has a hand-drawn portrait of the game he actually watched; what he experienced. I score major-league games even less. I mention this because ESPN. Despite. PDF Seriously, how did this proprietary format kedping the defacto distribution format for everything, including make money keeping score baseball docs?

Bill Shannon literally wrote the book on scorekeeping in the majors. Although it takes a significant number of people to stage the grand production that is a major league baseball game, what really matters ultimately gets decided between the white lines. While the TV and radio announcers can voice their colorful spins and the scribes can pen their versions of what played out on the diamond that day, no one but the players truly dictate what numbers appear in the final box score. Well, almost no one. Behind the scenes sits someone whose decisions can yield quite a bit of influence on the final line, yet most folks in the ballpark may not even be aware of his or her existence. Typically perched in an inconspicuous spot somewhere in the press box, the holder of this relatively unheralded and often thankless position can indirectly decide the winner of a batting title, whether a player receives an incentive-driven bonus, or even if your fantasy team finally beats that annoying braggart from the office. One of the more enjoyable aspects of this great game is how it can spur a seemingly endless amount of friendly most of the time arguments about topics that revolve around minutiae. Not many things spark these debates quicker than deciding between a hit or an error. What most fail to realize, however, is that the correct call can require both a trained eye and an intimate understanding of the rule book. Perhaps the late Bill Shannon summed it up best in Official Scoring in the Big Leagues , recalling an encounter between a famed New York sportswriter and a tennis legend. A supposedly incorrect call is treated as a crime against humanity. As a simple illustration, there was a game at Shea Stadium in which the charmed rookie Dwight Gooden was easily overpowering the Cubs in a game the Mets would eventually win, In the fifth inning, Keith Moreland hit a grounder to third that was mishandled but Moreland was, in all probability, going to beat it out anyway. Maury Allen scored it a hit. I would have done the same. On Sunday, Sept. In the course of events, Allen posed a question to McEnroe. While making the distinction between hit and error is certainly an important part of being an official scorer, it is just one of many important duties the scorer has on a game-by-game basis, a set of responsibilities that the viewing public, players, coaches and even media members usually know little about. And, perhaps most important, the ability to remain impartial. A sportswriter for the New York Daily News for 34 years, Foley began scoring at a time when the Baseball Writers Association of America still designated one of its members to serve as official scorer for each game. From through , he scored over 3, games as well as 10 World Series — the most by an official scorer in modern history. Owner Shaun Clancy became quick friends with Foley following his major league scoring days, a period in which Foley still served as a part-time official scorer for the Long Island Ducks of the Atlantic League.

Baseball: Keeping Score

Different fans have different methods of keeping a scorecard, and many use their own notations. But here’s a simple method:. If the hitter grounds out to shortstop, for example, write in «,» which shows the shortstop threw him out at first base. If the hitter flies out to left field, write a «7. If the batter gets a hit, write in the hit according to which base he reached.

There are two kinds of people who attend baseball games—those of use who dutifully record ma,e and every play on our scorecard, and basevall. You can probably guess which side of the divide I fall on. The ugly truth is, I had a lucrative part-time career in high school and college keeping score for local recreational softball leagues. The gig put money in scoree pocket and gave me a pretty solid working knowledge make money keeping score baseball the rules of baseball and softball. But it also had an unintended side effect: any game I attend—major league, minor league, company softball game—I have to mpney score. And if I were to pull out any one at random, I could probably give you a fairly faithful account and description of the game in question based on nothing more than moeny squiggles I made in a scorebook ages ago—depending on how many beers I had at the game, that is. The basic tools of scorekeeping—a pencil, a pad of paper, and a working understanding of symbology—have remained virtually unchanged since baseball took root in the late 19th century. The iPhone can do so much, the thinking goes—check airplane arrival times, stream live video, help you balance your checkbook. Keepint, it might be too maek to ask, actually. Because I just spent some time testing a trio of scorekeeping apps in advance of the newly-arrived baseball season. And while at least two of those kefping will get the job done, they managed to suck every last bit of enjoyment that I would otherwise derive from keeping a keepiing scorebook. The boxes to tick off balls and strikes are approximately flea-sized and not all that easy to tap if you have fingers wider than a tendril. No e-mail, no PDF, no syncing—unless I was so blind with rage from using the app that I overlooked the option. All that makes ScoreKeeper horrible. But the app also suffers from a show-stopping bug. ScoreKeeper is the first one that ever made me want to hurl my iPhone away in frustration. Which is not to say the either app will be making me leave behind my scorebook any time soon—iScore and K-Force each have their strong points, but neither struck me as much of an improvement over pen and paper. Note that there’s also a separate version of iScore for the iPad which I did not look at for this review. You can skip that last step, but the running pitch count that the app keeps on the screen will be wildly inaccurate. It would be better for iScore to give you the option to turn ball-and-strike counts off. Recording even the simplest of plays is similarly involved.