Scorecards are a dying art

What has happened to tradition in our modern day lives?   On a daily basis we are inundated with flashing lights, quick moving advertisements and click of a button information. Even in baseball, we are presented with the common modern day amenities that make our viewing much more joyful.  Gone are the (majority of) old green and white manually operated scoreboards that used to grace every park.  They have been replaced with the titantrons and mammoth sized LCD flat screens that are now commonplace not only in shiny new parks, but older parks have also been retrofitted to accommodate these new bells and whistles. 

My love of nostalgia gets the best of me and I can’t help but think, what happened to keeping score by hand?  The simple art of putting an itty bitty golf pencil to paper and making a permanent memory of what happened at the game you attended is a dying art.  At most parks – we will use Comerica Park in Detroit as an example, you can get your shiny cardstock scorecard and a golf pencil for a dollar right when you walk in the gate. For the most part, people buy them as a part of the programs that they will eventually keep for souvenirs.  But part of me can’t help but wonder… how many of those scorecards actually get written on let alone filled out completely?  How many of them actually get used at all? 

For me, scorecards and scorekeeping is a guilty pleasure.  I cannot help but buy one as I walk in.  A smile comes across my face when the vendor hands me that little golf pencil (I bring my own though – force of habit).  I like the feel of the shiny cardstock with all the letter and instructions on it.  I love the lack of wrinkles it has from over use.  It’s shiny and new and I’m about to destroy it with my baseball graffiti.  I love to get to my seat about a half hour before first pitch so I can fill out my card and get settled for the battle that I’m about to witness. I get psyched up as I write my favorite players names into favorable slots (Cabrera in the 3 slot, Ordonez in the 4, Granderson batting leadoff).  For me, this part of the game is more important that the final out – a fresh white scorecard has the same meaning as opening day.  A clean scorecard is a clean slate.  And I love the fact that when the game is done, I can take it home and put it on the bookshelf with all the other scorecards that I have filled out throughout the years knowing that at any time I can go back to it and relive that particular game – because it is right there in front of me in my own pen. 

As I sit in my shiny green seat above home plate I get a kick out of watching the crowd around me.  I see little kids, parents, teenagers, vendors and the older folks amongst me.  Suddenly I realize that I am in the minority – I am under the age of 30 and I am keeping score just like the two 70+ yr old men in the row below me and the woman to my left who is at least 85 yr old in the big straw hat to my left.  Suddenly I feel… old!!!  But I am not old!!!  Why aren’t the others keeping score like me? This sparks a major debate in my head.  Are these people not keeping score because they have other things to do (watch the kids, drink many beers) or are they just so accustomed to the modern amenities that they feel they don’t have to (aka: lazy)?  Then the light bulb goes off in my one track mind baseball lovin’ head… they aren’t keeping score because they don’t know how .  They don’t know how because the art of keeping score is a dying art. 

Scorecards are as unique as the individual that fills them out.  Like snowflakes, no two are alike.  Each scorer has their own loose interpretation of exactly what each symbol means and where in the box they put it is just as important as the symbol itself.  Ask me to read someone else’s scorecard and I’m sure I could figure it out, but it would take me a bit.  Just as the game is seen differently by each individual that attends it (I thought it was a ball, but apparently the ump did not…). Therein lies the wonderment of a completed scorecard – when the game is done and the dust has settled they all have the same outcome.  Wins and losses, 0-fers and hits, strikes and balls – its all there in one neat little paper package. 

But seeing that we are now living in the age of convenience, I realize why paper scorekeeping has gone to the wayside.  Children and teens and even people my age do not know how to keep score because they were never taught how to do so by their parents or relatives or older friends who came about in the age when electronic scorekeeping was making its big boom debut. Not to mention that keeping accurate score on paper is a time commitment.  You can’t get up in the middle of the 4th and stroll down to the concourse for a beer and bathroom break.  By leaving your seat, you to negate the mission of completing the entire scorecard – thus making the endeavor pointless.  This also goes for those parents with young children.  It is impossible for one to fill out an accurate scorecard while your child is on the fly-ball Ferris wheel or dragging you to the bathroom every other inning. 

With all the new parks have to offer, why would one want to sit in their seat and keep score? But old timers and nostalgia buffs like myself will tell you that it is worth it.  People who keep score on a regular basis have more of a feeling or a connection to the game.  You feel that since you took the time and the effort to map the whole game out in little boxes that you were a part of it somehow, like you were not only there but you were part of the team. There is a sense of pride when you get to the bottom of the 9th and your card is almost complete.  You know that you took the time and the dedication to complete your task.  And ultimately you hope for your team to do the same thing.  You hope that they take their time and that their dedication at completing their task of winning.

~Shelly