So I tried to do this Sunday at a Dodgers game [yay watching my player give up 7 runs in 1 2/3 innings!], but I messed up and got frustrated [both at the scorekeeping and at Andrew Miller] so I gave up. I learned at some point when I was young, but was a little rusty on some of the conventions [which aren’t universal, anyway]…also I blame the shitty Dodger scorecard. And Andrew Miller.
Anyway, thanks to the Internet, I’ve relearned and I’m going to give it another try. Though the All-Star Game is a terrible place to start, since I’ll be substituting in players constantly. Oh well.
This is the worst idea ever.
I used to score games constantly when I was younger, and then either fall asleep or have to go to bed before the game ended. The best of these are from the 1984 World Series, which feature about four innings of actual notation, plus my feeble attempts to spell “Lou Whitaker” and “Kurt Bevacqua”. Somewhere in the back of a closet, I have a bunch of old score sheets of All-Star Games from 1985-88 where my father has been forced to pencil in the thirty or so substitutions between innings 6 and 9, just so I wouldn’t wake up the next morning, crushed to learn that Brook Jacoby’s pinch-hit strikeout went unrecorded. Imagine if the All-Star Game had counted back then!
In conclusion, learning to score a baseball game during the All-Star Game is like learning the principles of financial accounting at MCI WorldCom, and Young Sean was a uniquely difficult child to raise.
