Baseball: A new way to score the game

By Ed Piper

This is quite a revelation. I now wish I had bought a new scorebook sooner.

Being one conspicuous in keeping score of baseball games (see my Spring Training entry last February when a female Giants fan remarked, "I've never seen someone score a game," much to my incredulity), I just bought a Rawlings "System-17" scorebook at Big 5.

And I'm pleased as I fill out the starting lineups for today's (Mon., Oct. 7) Astros-Rays ALDS game 3 from info on the Internet.

Like I might have said, I've gone a little crazy. Scoring a game I'm neither going to see or hear, most likely (unless I sneak out to listen to my car radio in the parking lot during lunch at my substitute teacher job at Canyon Crest Academy today)? Am I desperate, or what? As my former students would have said, "Do you have a life?"

Anyway, my old book, which was one of two I bought two years ago on the Internet (Peterson's--old school), didn't have each hitting slot numbered, so I hand-penciled that in. The old Peterson's (which we used to use in my day in high school, circa, 1971) also has only 11 or 12 hitting slots. So, when teams, as they do now, use a zillion situational relievers--or you go to Spring Training and are subjected to every farmhand the Brewers or D-backs have (sorry, Padres fans, I don't go to Arizona just to watch poor San Diego)--I would run out of room.

This new System-17 book already has visible advantages: The hitting slots are numbered. The "17" refers to 17 hitting slots, which is going to be celestial.

Plus each hitting spot has three spaces, allowing for insertion of two subs after the starter leaves the game.

So, I am just printing in neatly "Springer, Geo" (I abbreviated the Astros' leadoff hitter's first name due to space, even though I am writing microsopically small), then "Altuve, Jose" (with the accent over the "e" in "Jose", since I'm cool and I know where the accents go in Spanish--I'm saying this with humor, not superiority). I like Altuve--first and last names I can easily fit into the available space.

My craze began yesterday, Sunday, in the leadoff to my Dodgers' game at 4:45 p.m. PDT at Washington. I was at a men's retreat over the weekend at a beautiful spot in Pine Valley, so I missed Saturday's games entirely. During the drive from Clairemont up to Pine Valley late Friday afternoon, through the bumper-to-bumper I-8 traffic, I began scoring the Braves-Cardinals game, which the Braves came back to win to knot the NLDS best-of-five series 1-1 behind Michael Melancon's relief. He was the same guy who blew up the day before, so he got a little redemption.

Stay tuned for more postseason addictive behavior. Thanks, new scorebook. I plan to score part of as many of today's four Division Series games as I can. It's like being back in Spring Training: a million games to choose from. The baseball version of Coachella, or going back further, Woodstock.