Spring Training: 'Never seen that before'

I found another Spring Training devotee who keeps
score of games, even though you may not see
it too commonly anymore.  This was at the
Padrers-Dbacks game at Peoria Feb. 27.
(Photo by Ed Piper)
 

By Ed Piper

Having covered Gary Frank's La Jolla High baseball team, now for the 15th year (his 16th year as Viking head coach, breaking Bob Allen's record), and having worked as sports editor of a tiny daily newspaper (the Goleta Today) at the ripe age of 23 (four decades ago), I have been around baseball scorebooks and scoring ever since I was 10 years old, when Security First National Bank held a contest for a Dodgers-Pirates game and I learned how to score off the contest instructions.

My father nor my mother played a role in my learning this skill, since my dad had not been allowed to play sports when he was a youth because he held down three newspaper delivery routes (this was Depression era in the 1930's). My mother, a missionary kid growing up in China, certainly didn't have Title IX working for her back in the day. My older brother and I were their introductions into sports via youth baseball.

In view of my almost-55 years keeping score of games, I was surprised when a 30-ish woman in a Giants cap came up to me at a recent Spring Training game at Scottsdale Stadium in Arizona, the winter home of San Francisco's ball club.

"What are you doing?" she inquired as I marked balls and strikes and batter results in my Peterson's book. I was standing in the partial shade afforded by the stands stretching down the first base line behind the Giants' dugout.

I told her I was keeping score of the game. She said, "They have all that for us up there," indicating the scoreboard in left field.

I said, "No, they don't." I then proceeded to show her how I had recorded Giants second baseman Yangervis Solarte's single, and how that had advanced two runners on base ahead of him, indicated on the pertinent basepaths by a "4", Solarte's position number at second base.

I patiently told my locutor that each defensive position had a number, starting with "1" for the pitcher, "2" for the catcher, "3" through 6" around the infield, and "7" through "9" for the outfielders, starting in left.

She looked totally bored, and distracted, as she looked away during part of my explanation.

It wasn't confrontational. We had rapport. She just wasn't buying what I was selling. I joked with her, "You'll probably end up being the Giants' official scorer." She said, "Maybe."

Finally, she concluded with, "I've never seen anyone do that." Meaning scoring a game.

This is the first time in my 55 years of scoring that someone has told me that.

Later, tiring of standing, and seeing the pre-Spring sun sink lower in the sky in the eastern Valley of the Sun, I sat down in a seat in the lowest section, past first base.

After the game, an elderly woman, watching the game with her husband in the row behind me, told me, "I haven't seen someone score a game in a long time." I then related to her my experience with the 30-ish woman earlier who had never seen a person keep score.

She was interested. She said, "I've seen people score, it's just been a long time."

Before I sat in a seat (I bought a bleacher ticket just to get in the ballpark), I bounced my no-score experience off a park employee. He said, "Well, you know these days, people don't write stuff down or keep track of it." Something like that. He said people mostly do things electronically these days.

I also bounced it off the medic who gave me a Band-Aid (cracking dry skin on my fingers in the Arizona dryness) earlier. What fascinated me was that the woman was wearing a Giants cap, evidently not witnessing her first baseball game. I would have thought she would have caught a view of at least one person in her experience attending games keeping score with the scorecard commonly given out at major league games. But no.

What my interchange with the woman did for me was heighten my awareness of the fact I was doing something fairly rare. One person commented to me, "You're keeping score of a Spring Training game?" He couldn't believe it. But he didn't say he hadn't ever seen someone keep score.

A 30-ish couple who moved to Peoria (location of the Padres' Spring Training facility) two years ago from Orange County talked with me at a Rangers-White Sox game at Surprise Stadium in Surprise. "We said to each other, 'Hey, that guy is keeping score,'" the husband, Joel, told me. His wife played varsity softball in high school, so she knew sports. Some women, no offense, aren't as familiar with sports as your average male.

"We've seen people keep score a lot (over the years)," the wife said.

I sensed people attributing more baseball knowledge to me because of my scorebook than they would have if I weren't scoring the game. One guy at a Dodgers game at Camelback Ranch turned and asked me what position A.J. Pollock was playing. I told him left field. By his words to me, he indicated he figured I knew baseball pretty well.

Another man, one of the "Kansas City 5" I chatted with throughout a Padres-Diamondbacks game at Peoria--only 2,200 in attendance on the first Wednesday of exhibition games--asked in a friendly manner to look at my scorebook. I willingly passed it to him across the aisle on the first base side. This was in the context of ongoing interchanges with the five during the game, as they sat in various rows and re-positioned to talk with one another and with other fans as they went back and forth to buy concessions.

"Out of curiosity, why did you want to look at it?" I asked him. Two of the five are retired, the other three still working. They make one or two trips per baseball seasons. Last year they visited Jacobs Field in Cleveland, Camden Yards in Baltimore, and the Pirates' park in Pittsburg, all popular retro stadiums. This was their first Spring Training trip from Kansas City, where they live.

He replied, "I wanted to see if you scored differently from other people." "Did you see anything in the book?" I asked him. He indicated not really.

Spring Training games can grow a little interesting to keep score of after the first three innings. Managers use the February/March games to see as many of their prospective players as possible, and the press box doesn't even know where all the players are being inserted in the batting order. The scoreboard, at times, isn't much help, if the scoreboard operator doesn't have or isn't showing player name, number, data on the stadium scoreboard.

My Peterson's scorebook, designed for a regular nine-inning game, doesn't handle one new pitcher an inning, which happened, especially after the second inning, in some of the nine or so games I scored of the 10 total I attended in eight days Feb. 22-March 1. (I didn't score an A's game I went to the second half of, tuckered out from lack of sleep and hurrying between two games, which I only did for two days, then went back to attending one afternoon game per day.)