Once again, I stood in line for a few hours yesterday and wound up with Chris House’s seats at Fenway. The company was different — Amrys and Mike — and the game had a much better ending, but the opponent (Baltimore) was the same and upon shuffling around, I sat in the exact same seat. Amrys took pictures and has already blogged about the night.
As I mentioned before, last time I bought a program and kept score. However, I was highly disappointed with their score card, as it was little more than some graph paper. With this in mind, I stopped off at City Sports before getting in line and bought a scorebook. I found it much more pleasing to keep score in the traditional manner with the miniature field and places to keep track of the pitch count.
Keeping score at ballgames is somewhat of a lost art — although it was the topic of my favorite mystery hunt puzzle this year. My dad taught me how back when I played softball, but I was somewhat surprised to find out that neither Amrys nor Mike knew how to score a game. To my mathematical mind, it’s very satisfying to have a record of all of the games events reduced to a single piece of paper. You can even use LaTeX if you like (source code here — scroll down).
In a way, a filled out scorecard is kind of like it’s own language — Mike likened it to hieroglyphics. It does miss a handful of events that don’t translate neatly into the “language,” including extra foul balls beyond the 2nd strike (which makes calculating the overall pitch count impossible). Another problem is that there’s no distinguishing a spectacular play from a routine one — although I did star Trot Nixon’s diving catch in right field. But there was no good way to mark that Jay Gibbons triple (marked as a long ball to deep center) resulted in Johnny Damon crashing headfirst into the wall, which caused him to sit out the remainder of the game. As the saying goes, “They all look like line drives in the scorebook.”
I’ll take this book with me when I go to all of the upcoming games at various stadiums that I have planned. This way it will become a sort of diary of games. I’ve just added a Reds game in Cincinnati next Tuesday night — a detour to visit Martine on my way to Ann Arbor.