Baseball games are scored one turn at bat (Plate Appearance) at a time. The information entered should reflect everything that affected the player in that inning.
Not only is the player’s activity at the plate recorded, but his entire life on the bases in the inning.
To start, we will keep it simple and focus on how to record a player’s turn at bat. Later, we will expand the lesson to include men on base.
Before each game, the coaches exchange batting lineups. The person assigned by the head coach enters the starting lineup for both teams. When entering the lineups it makes sense to find two blank pages facing each other if you’re using a bound scorebook. It makes it much easy to transition from the scorecard of one team to the other.
The team that bats first in a game is known as the “Visitors”, and the team batting last is the “Home team”.
In the scorebook, enter the Visitors’ lineup on the left facing page and the Home team’s lineup on the rightEntering the Game Information
Game information should be recorded on both the Visitors and Home scorecard pages for future reference. The Game information to note include:
In the example below the game information entered tells you all need to know for future reference.
Mets vs. Titans on May 25, 2008 @ 2:00. Game conditions were hot and sunny.
See anything missing? Where was the game played?
There’s no specific field on this particular scorecard but there is a Notes section available.
The scorecard page has many columns. The leftmost columns contain the player information. Players names are entered down the page in the order in which they are assigned to bat. The following information should be included:
Uniform Number
Shown here with a column heading titled “#”
Player Name
Shown here with a column heading titled “Line Up”
Player Position
Shown here with a column heading “Pos”
Located to the right of the player information are columns for recording the events of the game as they occur, by inning.
Notice in the example to the right that a “1″ appears in the column heading to the right of the player’s position. The “1″ represents the first inning. The innings following sequentially left to right across the scorecard.
Each player’s turn at bat is recorded in the respective cell for the inning in which they bat.
The cells of a scorebook differ from publisher to publisher but all have a lightly lined diamond in the center of each cell. The diamond represents the bases, with home plate at the bottom, first base to the right, second base at the top of the diamond and third base to the left. As batters advance their progress is recorded by drawing a line from base to base, starting at home plate and proceeding counter-clockwise around the diamond.
The Scorecard allows for tallying game totals for each player and also by inning.
Player’s game statistics are entered in the columns at the far right side of the scorecard.
Inning statistics are placed in the section provided at the bottom of each scorecard.
Important Players game statistics recorded are:
Inning statistics recorded include:
(not illustrated)
