Keeping Score

When I was nine years old, my dad took me to my first baseball game - at Fenway Park, to see the Sox play the Tigers. In an effort to teach me the game and to keep me engaged, he bought me a score card and taught me how to keep score. Actually, he taught me a primitive method of score-keeping, appropriate to a boy who still wasn't sure what a shortstop was. His version was simply one horizontal line for a single, two for a double, three for a triple, etc. He didn't realize that he was creating a monster. In the twenty-five years since, I almost never go to baseball games without keeping score.

That's a lot of baseball too: I'm going to estimate that I go to about twelve major league games per year on average. In some years it's many more: I've already been to fifteen so far in 2016. (And I'll be at Camden Yards tonight, and again on Friday.) That number probably spiked in around 2010, when I had no wife to answer to, and Nationals Park was a mere twenty-minute Metro ride away. Then again, it was a little tougher to get to games during my childhood, when doing so required me to convince an adult to provide me with a ticket and transportation.

Conservatively, I'm going to estimate that I've been to somewhere between 250 and 275 major league games, at twenty-six different stadiums. And probably another twenty or so minor league games.

I've had my scorecard with me for almost all of them, and at times, it has proven pretty inconvenient to carry around a spiral notebook that you'd like to keep dry, free of mustard stains and in otherwise pristine - or at least legible - condition. Two weeks ago, I took it with me to the park and, when it started to downpour, ended up spending more than two hours with it tucked under my shirt. Another time, after a Nationals Game, I brought it with me to a bar in Adams Morgan, where I learned that most girls aren't all that impressed with baseball score book - even when it contains the full box score from Stephen Strasburg's debut. Once, at a Pawtucket Red Sox game, a guy asked me if I was a professional scout, to which I responded, "No, just a professional nerd."

I have a fanatical devotion to accuracy in my scoring. Rationally, I concede that it makes no sense: in the age of the internet, anyone can easily look up a box score from any game and find a much more detailed, even scientific account of what happened. Still, I find myself panicking sometimes when I miss a play. "Wait, did Davis just strike out looking or swinging?? Did anyone see that?" Although, I'm not above looking up the answers online.

I've taught Maya to keep score too. Turns out, it's kind of something I require in a spouse. She's actually great at it. Sure, she sometimes forgets the difference between a forward and a backward K, but that's splitting hairs.

Trying to understand my commitment to scoring, a friend asked me last week if I used to play baseball. "Yes," I told him, "I was pretty bad at it. But I think I'm pretty good at scoring. So I've kept up with that."