Virginia District 16 Little League
Keeping the Scorebook
Keeping an accurate scorebook is an important step in tracking pitch count. It also comes into play when a game is postponed (e.g., rain delay), or in protest situations. On the more fun side, some people that keep a book do so to follow the game more closely, keep a record of the game that can be review play-for-play or even pitch-by-pitch at a later date, or to use in calculating player batting, pitching, and fielding statistics.
Every scorekeeper keeps the book differently. Scoring notations are different, different symbols and abbreviations are used, and different information is tracked. There is no "right" or "official" way to keep score. As a scorekeeper at a Little League game, you usually need to be able to:
- Report the inning and score
- Report the count for the batter
- Report the pitch count
- Track the batting lineup
- Track substitutions and playing time
- Recreate the situation (batter's count, runners on base, score, inning, etc.) after a delay
As long as you can reliably keep track of those items, you are keeping the book "correctly". A more advanced scorekeeper might also want to know where a given hitter hit last time up, be able to calculate batting average, on-base percentage, earned-run average, or any of dozens of other statistics that coaches, players, and baseball aficionados love to discuss.
Example
I'll describe a basic way to keep score by walking through part of an actual game, showing the scorebook along the way. Most scorekeepers will use notations similar to what I use here, but there are plenty of other systems that can be used. Most scorebooks have a description of their method inside the front cover or on the first few pages, and plenty of web sites show examples online. Choose one that makes sense to you, and add to it or change it as you get some experience.
First, the setting: This is a description of a Little League game, "Orange" vs. "Blue". The game is played with a continuous batting order; there are no substitutes. I'll only be describing the game while "Blue" is at bat. As we join the game in the middle of the 1st inning, "Orange" is winning by 4.
I'll walk through the game, pitch-by-pitch. You'll see how the scorebook would be updated as we proceed.
Keep in mind that this is just one example of a scorekeeping notation. 100 different scorekeepers would likely have 100 different notations. What you have to track (e.g., pitches, including foul balls) is more important that how you track it. Pick something you understand, and keep it consistent.
For the impatient, here's a scan of one page of the scorebook for the game, where I tracked just the basic information.
Another scan shows the same game with a lot more information. In fact, as I write this many months after the game actually took place, the only significant part of the pitch-by-pitch description that I wasn't able to recreate from the scorebook was the pitch sequence: I usually only track which pitch was the first pitch. So, for the purposes of this tutorial I made up a pitch sequence. Sorry for the historical inaccuracy.
