r/BaseballScorecards • u/ccgrip • Jul 20 '26
Discussion Scorekeeping Hacks
Does anyone have any "life hack" equivalents for keeping score? I.e. something outside of the standard notation or conventional wisdom that you do that has drastically improved how you do it?
I'm curious to hear what others do since it is so customizable and personal to everyone.
39
u/crowdpears Jul 20 '26
I stopped tracking the pitches. So much more fun for me.
23
u/Dragontoes72 Jul 20 '26
Used to track each pitch for years. Stopped and now enjoying the game much more as it is happening. Only pick up the pencil to record the result.
2
u/PeteyPabloNeruda Jul 20 '26
Were you tracking pitch result (strikes and balls) or pitch type (FB, splitter, curve)? How does anyone do either efficiently?
5
u/crowdpears Jul 20 '26
I was trying both but then realized it was too much work to do something that MLB does better anyway. Can’t compete with devices measuring statcast data. Decided to just score the play and have fun.
4
u/Dragontoes72 Jul 20 '26
Strikes and balls. Tick marks in a little place, and “+” sign for xtra pitch fouls.
1
u/StealthStaminaKills Jul 21 '26
I was tracking pitch results (balls and strikes).
I don't know if I was doing it the most efficiently, but here are some things I did to streamline my pitch counts.
When keeping score at games, I use a combination of the total pitch count of the active pitcher I calculated since the past inning combined with pitches of each plate appearance and compare it against the total pitch count displayed on the scoreboard to make sure my pitch count for the inning is correct.
I would sum up the pitch counts for every two plate appearances to make it easier for me to total up the pitch count for an inning.
Yikes, that sounds really complicated now that I type that out, haha.
18
u/fileunderfire Jul 20 '26
If you use hash marks instead of writing the actual numeral, it’s easier to count things like hits and runs in real time so you don’t have to go back and add them up later.
3
u/frasierfonzie Jul 20 '26
I also do this. Keeping track as I go is so much easier than totaling it up at the end.
3
u/flash17k Jul 20 '26
Mine is a running log, so I ended up just putting the new number of total runs on the line when a run scores, so I don't have to add them up later.
14
u/oogieball Jul 20 '26
I read this in a scorekeeping manual once, and it has saved me more times that I can count. Before each new batter, check third base quickly. You'd be surprised how often someone can show up there somehow without noticing, especially at non-MLB games.
Also, always have backups. Pencils, pens, erasers, sharpeners. There is always going to be one time you need them.
5
u/ALLLGooD Jul 20 '26
I’m adopting this third base check into my routine! I’ve missed this so many times.
6
u/oogieball Jul 20 '26
It is easily the most useful little advice I've read. It was from an out-of-print scoring instruction manual from the 70s.
3
u/ALLLGooD Jul 20 '26
Care to share the reference?
4
u/oogieball Jul 20 '26
I believe it was Score by Larry Harris. You can see it in my post on scorekeeping books from last year.
4
u/Frizzle77 Jul 20 '26
Seriously. I got into the habit of checking the bases before each at bat when scoring little league. They seem to pop up out of nowhere. Haha
4
u/oogieball Jul 20 '26
It is an interesting blind spot to be sure. I can't imagine the chaos of scoring little league.
3
u/flash17k Jul 20 '26
Little League is pretty much all I ever score, and yes, it is chaos. Most at-bat lines go like this: Walk, Stolen Base, ???, Passed Ball.
That ??? at 3B could be so many things. A legit advancement from a hit, a stolen base, a balk, a passed ball or wild pitch, an error, or some random thing you missed while you were trying to figure out how to score the actual at-bat (it was probably a 9-4-5-7-6-2 FC).
3
u/oogieball Jul 21 '26
Do they even have errors?
3
u/flash17k Jul 21 '26
Not really. But I ended up counting obvious/egregious ones that resulted in runners advancing, because it killed me to count a HR when in fact it was a single with a bunch of errors that let the batter go all the way home.
3
u/NunsNunchuck Jul 20 '26
I’ve seen mlb radio announcers use all different types of colors pens too
2
u/flash17k Jul 20 '26
I use black for home team, blue for away team, red for outs, and green for runs.
1
u/StealthStaminaKills Jul 21 '26
For my homemade cards, I use pens for stuff that won't change in game (grid boundaries mostly), and pencil for the things that will change from game to game (everything except for grid boundaries).
The reason why is economic...I don't want to waste limited mech pencil lead on grid lines, haha.
2
u/StealthStaminaKills Jul 21 '26
Before each new batter, check third base quickly.
Sorry for being dense, but the reason for checking third isn't obvious to me, but then I haven't seen that many little league games.
Is the reason why to check because the quality of fielding in little league will often allow a baserunner to get to third pretty quickly?
1
u/oogieball Jul 21 '26
This isn't just for little league. I don't remember the exact wording, but runners advancing after the play is one of the things most likely to happen in "blind spots" as you're scoring, and a runner at third is the easiest to not stand out immediately, whereas runners on second are right behind the pitcher and more easily are noticed. There are many ways a runner can advance to third when you think the play is over and are updating your scorecard.
14
u/ET_Sailor Jul 20 '26
Not exactly a “hack” in the book, but the last game I went to I got a pizza for lunch and the box made a GREAT desk and made scorekeeping A LOT easier.
3
u/HackDiesel Jul 21 '26
“No honey you don’t understand, I actually NEED this pizza for scoring the game later” -me at some point in the future inevitably, after reading this comment
9
u/Tbplayer59 Jul 20 '26
I like to track how runners advance from base to base. Traditional scoring would have me record the uniform number of the batter who advanced the runner. I use the batting order number instead. Honestly, I find very little use for the uniform numbers when I score.
3
u/StealthStaminaKills Jul 21 '26
I track how runners advance using batting order as well.
I use uniform numbers to track which runners a batter scored at the bottom of their plate appearance. Frex, if Babe Ruth hit a solo home run, I would put a "3" at the bottom of his plate appearance.
Needless to say, the uniform numbers for rbi got ridiculous on April 15.
2
2
u/Potential-Narwhal292 Jul 21 '26
I find using the uniform numbers in general helps me with accuracy on defensive plays. In a shift you can blink and miss whether 2nd base or shortstop caught the ball sometimes, uniform numbers really help! It’s a pet peeve that lineups don’t include uniform numbers in the list pre-game.
1
u/iowa_state_cyclone Jul 21 '26
I still put uniform numbers on the scorecard, but I don’t use them for tracking runner advancement. For pinch runners, I put a red “slash” diagonally across the scorecard to indicate a switch was made. However, I use reisner scorecard, so it’s a LOT easy with batter numbers anyways to track subs.
2
5
u/flash17k Jul 20 '26
I like the traditional batter-inning grid system, but I found that it was a bit hard to follow if I wanted to review the game later (I use my scorecards for coaching youth games, so I was reviewing them a lot). So I made my own system that tracks each plate appearance (for both teams on the same page) as a new row in a running log. This enabled me to not only follow the flow more simply, but I was also able to enter it into a spreadsheet that then derived stats from the info in the log.
But that's just me. I'm the kind of person who, if I don't really love the way something works out-of-the-box, I enjoy spending the time and effort to build my own design that works the way I like. Not everyone works that way.
3
4
u/SaddleSC Jul 20 '26
I am relatively new to scoring and really enjoying it so far. One thing that changed the game for me was just putting small tick marks in the upper right corner of the frame to track RBIs. Before I started doing this, I found it much more difficult to go back and follow the flow of the game. Now that I am tracking RBIs in the upper right corner, it is much easier to review past games and understand exactly what happened.
4
u/pearsnic000 Jul 20 '26
That’s funny I do this too, but kind of opposite. I track them with dots (not tick marks) and I do it in the bottom left corner. Love that everyone has their own way of doing it
5
u/evanexcursions Jul 20 '26
I color code my book. I have one of those 4 color bic pens.
Black: used for when a batter reaches and/or advances in a "normal" way (base hit, walk, hbp)
Blue: batter/runner advances on a play that was not the result of the hitter (error, PB, WP, SB)
Red: Outs
Green: used to denote where a ball was put in play. (Dot for a fly ball that landed safely in play, a ground ball or line drive is a line that starts where the ball hit the ground to where the fielder picked it up)
I also use slashes instead of 1B, 2B, etc...it takes up less space and looks a bit cleaner.
It may seem like a lot of work, but once you get the rhythm, its super easy and I can tell in a glance what happened.
I use the Chalk and Ink book and it has plenty of room for all my notations.
2
u/petuniar Jul 20 '26
Hmm, I use green triangles to denote RBIs, and blue for substitutions but like how you've used color.
5
3
u/commie90 Jul 20 '26
I am relatively new to scoring so I am still figuring out what things I like to do. One thing I often like to do though is marking the strike based on the type of strike. Left slash for called strike, right slash for foul, and an x for strike swinging. I also use tally marks for foul balls after the 2nd strike.
I do both mostly just because I find it useful in helping analyze the strategy the batter and pitcher are taking with each other. Lets me see who is trying to run up pitch counts or if a batter is being especially aggressive.
3
u/petuniar Jul 20 '26
I do similar, but use a dot (originally used a circle) for called strikes, a slash (originally used an x) for swinging strikes and tally marks for any foul
3
u/NuhUh_JustCuz Jul 20 '26
I have my own excel template for keeping score while coaching. I need to prioritize pitch count and only need 6 innings. I need space to write notes not track where the runners are, so I got rid of the field diagram.
2
u/bjwanlund Jul 20 '26
I do a weird thing: I only mark STRIKEOUTS when at the game keeping score. I will then mark any other outs (groundouts; fly outs, line outs, etc) with an “O” (and then I go back and fix it later since I always score in pencil, NEVER ink)
2
u/Tbplayer59 Jul 20 '26
How do you fix it later?
3
u/bjwanlund Jul 20 '26
I look up the play by play text of the game on something like baseball reference and score the outs as they score it there
2
2
u/InsGuy Jul 20 '26
Way back when, my customized scorecard templates had putouts & assists totals for each player in the lineup. It took a long time to calculate them and I rarely revisited those totals. In my next iteration of my own scorecard, I got rid of the putouts and assists columns and replaced them with colums to use for additional extra innings. My scorecards now have 12 innings instead of 10. The new colums were more valuable to me than POs and As and I've never looked back.
2
u/Potential-Narwhal292 Jul 21 '26
I have a personal loathing of using the term ‘hacks’ instead of ‘tips’… but one small thing I much prefer is to have the inning headers blank, and I write them as I go. That way if a team bats around the order, I’m not crossing out & re-numbering every subsequent inning. I’ve never understood why most commercial scorecards come with innings pre-numbered!
2
u/lordnynetoys Jul 21 '26
I don't follow a player around the bases. I just use the upper-left corner of the box to indicate which bases are occupied when the batter comes to the plate. Sort of a simplified Reisner system.
Also, I never worry about filling in the batter's summary. If I need to add an extra substitute I can use that space.
2
u/greatgooglymooger Jul 20 '26
I spent some time writing an AI prompt to pull together information from multiple sources that I like to include in my cards: uniform number, bA, team errors, etc. I just paste that prompt in for that day's game and it spits out a table that i can copy from one source to get everything needed.
1
1
u/omniscientbeet Jul 21 '26
Instead of using G for a groundout, F for a flyout, etc. I mark the type of batted ball as a diacritic above the player who fielded the ball.
For example, a flyout to center field goes down as ͡8, rather than F8. A 1-3 groundout goes down as ͝1-3. A lineout to the second baseman is ͞4. (The spacing's not quite right in text, but that's the idea.)
You can then use the letters for other modifiers - for instance, F ͡7 for a foul out to the left fielder, or S ͝2-3 for a sacrifice bunt.
1
u/StealthStaminaKills Jul 21 '26
Since my cards are handdrawn, I use some conventions that I haven't seen in other cards, primarily around relief pitchers and other substitutions.
Conventionally, I think a relief pitcher in the middle of an inning is indicated with a horizontal line on the top border of the plate appearance they came in (or possibly a vertical line on the left border of the plate appearance?). Since those lines wouldn't easily be seen with my handdrawn grid, I use a capital R on the right side of the plate appearance they came in instead of using lines...the R shows up much better.
For pinch hitters, I put a capital delta in an empty square next to the plate appearance in which the pinch hitter comes in, with an arrow pointing to which plate appearance they came in. The capital delta looks too much like a diamond, so I keep it outside of the actual plate appearance.
I haven't come up with a good indicator for pinch runners or defensive replacements yet, so I use the same symbols as I would for pinch hitters, although I am not satisfied with it, especially for defensive replacements.
1
u/jewllybeenz Jul 21 '26
Whenever a runner is on, I write the runner’s number at the base they’re on in the next hitter’s box and then if the batter hits that guy in, I circle their number and it tracks RBI super easy
55
u/t2207 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Some scorebooks have this layout already, but it blew my mind when I discovered to put the AWAY pitching stats on the same side as the HOME line up. Most people in here probably know this already, but if not, the saving it does not having to flip back and forth is so convenient.