My daughter has played little league softball for years, and somehow, I’ve avoided volunteering for anything all this time. I’ve never been a “team mom.” I’ve never raked an infield or created chalk lines. I’ve paid teenagers a pittance to take on my concession stand duties. I’ve bought the whole damn box of fundraising candy bars and distributed them free to beggars. (Well, the ones I didn’t personally eat. The candy bars, not the beggars. And where “beggars” are defined as trick-or-treaters or anyone else I can pawn the damned things off on.)
In an inexplicable and unprecedented paroxysm of guilt and stupidity during the most recent call for volunteers, I raised my hand when no one else volunteered to fill the position of team scorekeeper. “How hard can it be?” I thought. I can count the damned kids when they cross the plate. I should have realized by the surprised reaction of several people — including the team manager and my daughter — that this was a huge mistake while there was still time to back out.
My MLB-loving, baseball stat-encyclopedia husband wasn’t there to stop me, but when I told him I was going to be the scorekeeper, this is what he said: “Hahahahahahaha!” As it turns out, there’s a lot more to it than counting runs and calculating simple sums. For example, the image below is not the Mars Rover schematics I first took it for but rather the scorekeeper’s sheet:
Fuck! Also, you have to know what things like “Fielder’s Choice” and “Pass Ball” are. And when things are “errors” and “assists” and the code to record who did what. And you have to keep track of rosters and substitutions for both teams. And you have to politely repel angry grandmas who insist you’re fucking up the error assignment, even though it’s only a goddamn scrimmage game, so she should shut the fuck up or volunteer to do it herself. And you can’t enjoy watching your own kid play because every second you have to track every fucking activity occurring on the field, with no breaks to pee or get a drink, which you’ll dearly wish was vodka instead of tepid water.
Man, this sucks! I found a tablet app for scorekeeping, but the league officials shot that idea down because they want their precious stats in their precious spiral notebooks. I have to keep score this afternoon for reals this time. Please keep me in your thoughts.
[X-POSTED at Rumproast]
Joey Maloney
You’re done for. Feign a stroke midway through the first inning.
PaulW
This is why football is my primary sport love… ;-)
imonlylurking
When do you have to turn in the Precious Spiral Notebook? Can’t you use the tablet app and transfer later?
geg6
Just one more reason to never have kids, IMHO. As if I needed any. ;-)
Villago Delenda Est
That’s an incomplete scorecard form. I don’t see the column for “groin scratches between pitched balls” there anywhere.
MattF
Yup. Baseball scorekeeping is designed by and for the obsessive-compulsive, not for the fun-loving blogger. And no bathroom breaks either, needless to say.
Not Sure
Well, you tell them you get to use your iPad app, or they can find someone else to keep score. This is the 21st century, for Christ’s sake. They’re moving the Astros to the American league just to make it even. They’re going to have two wild cards per league. All this crap about the purity of the game died a generation ago.
different-church-lady
I forget which broadcaster it was who’s scorecards were littered with one of his personal codes: ‘WW’. It stood for “Wasn’t watching.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Not Sure:
Yup, that ship sailed when the DH rule was introduced, and with the invention of the metal bat.
WhyKnot241
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa…breathe…HaHaHaHaHaHaHa…breathe…HaHaHaHaHaHaHa
Ya, you really stepped in it now. ‘Course your only (somewhat) graceless out is to: 1) mark the stats in a completely random (and wrong) way, 2) act totally confused, and 3) hope the team calls back the previous glutton for all things numeric.
c u n d gulag
@different-church-lady:
That would be the late, great, Phil Rizzuto.
c u n d gulag
Scoring a baseball game is easy.
If it was difficult, we wouldn’t have so many sportswriters or announcers.
If you’d given me a bit of time, I could easily have explained it for you.
Good luck – and remember, you don’t need to be a member of Phi Beta Kappa, or MENSA to do it.
Poopyman
Well, my initial reaction is the same as your husband’s. But used to be that one of the (many odd) passages to manhood was learning to keep score. Stands to reason, too – that thing was invented by males as a shorthand for every move on the field. Don’t ask me to decipher choreography notation.
Anyway, your best bet is to hire a tweener who plays baseball and get him to sit with you through the game, if not actually subcontract the scorekeeping to him.
dmsilev
I suggest deliberately doing a bad job. “Jane Smith had two assists, finished the butterfly lap in 1:30, threw two interceptions, and finished three minutes back from the lead in the third mountain stage.”
You’ll be off the hook in about twenty seconds.
WaterGirl
Uh oh.
FlyingToaster
No pity here.
I was taught to score games while watching the (temporarily) KC Athletics. By my dad, the assistant coach to all sports except soccer. “Since you’re too sick to play, you can at least keep score.” Making seven-year-olds learn to keep a scorecard would be considered child abuse nowadays.
Mind you, if WarriorGirl ever sits down and learns to read, I’ll probably teach her, too. Just don’t tell DCF.
And, use your app. Transfer to paper after. Makes it easier to correct mistakes, like pencilling over the entire page the third time someone’s grandma harasses you. If the league doesn’t like it, let them supply their own scorekeepers.
maye
my sister, who was quite adept at baseball scorekeeping, once volunteered to be the scorekeeper at a high school basketball game. “What’s the difference?”she mistakenly thought………. It was ugly.
Bunt
You think that’s obsessive, my father still has a big box of notebooks filled with scorecards from thousands of games of StratoMatic baseball he played with his friends in 80s and 90s. That would be a board game. Though he does compile databases for a living, so I don’t know if he thinks it’s strange.
Kilgore Trout
This. Must be why I always loved keeping the book when I coached. I was going to suggest iScore for the iPad before I saw the league didn’t like that option.
Your best hope is to find another parent who knows how to do it and can help you through your first game. Once you’ve done a game or two it will be pretty easy aside from the occasional FUBAR trainwreck of a play.
I’m a little bummed that our 16 year-old decided not to play this year after making the JV team at school last year as a freshman. So I’m volunteering for our local little league as an umpire this year to get my baseball fix.
Poopyman
Maybe it’s because you crossposted at Rumproast, but I’ve got an ad for KFC’s Chunky Chicken Pot Pie above the comments. Two guys (white & black) in 70’s clothes with “a Classic” and “CAN YOU DIG IT?” banners. Only $3.99.
Mmmmmm. Pot pie.
patrick II
I don’t know what particular tablet app you were using, but the big advantage of the better ones is that they keep a running tab of statistics, both team and individual, for your team. The cumulative batting averages, slugging %, runs scored, rbi’s etc. You can always print them out and put them in a binder. Earnest coaches often end up doing that by hand, and he might not realize the time it will save him.
I would pitch it again soon because shortly it won’t be worth going back and re-entering the data.
Davis X. Machina
It’s like keeping a game score in chess, as opposed to just playing skittles. A little more work, you get used to it in a hurry, but it makes everything else you do better, later, because you can analyze stuff over time, game-to-game not just in the moment. And there’s stuff you can’t easily claim — batting out of order, e.g., or draws by threefold repetition or the 50-move role — without one. Not often, but enough.
Once either becomes automatic — and it happens with surprisingly little practice — you won’t play/watch without it.
WyldPirate
@imonlylurking:
Yeah, that will be a lot of fun transcribing all of that crap by and for each player, inning and game for a dozen or so games.
This reminds me of the stinking “classroom management software” where I work. Two entries for each student for each class in digital format with tracking codes as to whether or not they were late, present or absent. Then we also have to keep a paper roll.
I long for the days when you didn’t have to give a fuck as to whether adult students showed up for classes. I also long for the days–promised 30 years ago–of the mythical “paperless office” as I’m still drowning in dead tree products.
Ash Can
Send your husband to do it instead.
Yevgraf
No good deed goes unpunished.
geg6
Since this is an open thread and I absolutely hate, hate, hate baseball and anything connected to it (as only a Pittsburgh Pirates fan can), can I just say that I am not ashamed to be waiting with bated breath and racing heart for “Game Change” on HBO? And how hilarious I’m finding it that John Heilmann (and not his co-writer) seems to be getting the lion’s share of praise for it?
Oh, man! Just finished watching Real Time on HBO2 and now they are showing American Splendor. I love, love, love Harvey Pekar. RIP, the poet laureate of Cleveland.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
FTFY. SABR 19th Century Base Ball Committee member.
johnsmith1882
@Not Sure: that’s two generations ago. and scoring a baseball game, like keeping score in bowling, is easy — if you know how to do it. which most people don’t want to bother to learn, so guys like me always end up having to do it, at the expense of beer and chit-chat time. also, glad to hear your epic battle with beef supreme turned out, how’s presidentin’ in the 26th century going?
kdaug
I played APA billiards, both 8 and 9 ball, for 17 seasons straight until last fall when I took a break. Same cryptic scoresheets, but we cycled through the team on who kept score. 8 ball is easy – just ball down – but 9 ball you have to watch every damn shot, and at 10:00 pm in the bar it can be, um, a pain in the ass.
Lawnguylander
@WyldPirate:
Scoresheets from iPad apps and the like can very easily be printed out. No transcription necessary. Must you always be wrong?
@patrick II:
My favorite is ESPN’s iScore. It not only does all that but it keeps spray charts, you can track pitch locations and all kinds of stuff like that. I would never care about that level of detail for town little league games but Manhasset and Garden City must be beaten. The mom of one of the kids on the travel team I coach scored our games the last two summers with it and it was amazing to have that kind of data. Especially by the second season when we had seen some of the same teams 4 or 5 times already.
JGabriel
Betty Cracker:
It’s not too late to get out of this. For instance, you could eat the kids.
.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: WW = Wasn’t Watching = GENIUS! I am so stealing that! Luckily for me the mister will be at the game today so he can help/take over the whole goddamned thing.
Raven
I spent over 20 years administrating municipal athletic programs. I had an 18 league program with 180 teams and a cadre of official scorekeepers. You can catch on but the idea of not using the iPad App is stupid. Then again I got out of it because I became convinced it was ALL stupid. Let the kids play ball.
Montysano
When you make an error and the fist fight breaks out, just remember: lead with your strong hand and protect your face.
JGabriel
@Poopyman:
Chicken Pot Pie. Don’t want someone from the DEA getting any wrong ideas.
.
ChrisB
@Bunt: What’s unusual or obsessive about that? I still remember a home run Don Mincher hit for me in 1971.
And Betty, what you signed up for is incredibly important. Don’t screw it up.
SBJules
It will keep you humble. I used to keep score for city league softball. I thought I did a great job; that was not a universally held opinion. No consolation, but basketball is harder to keep score.
Raven
@SBJules: Especially of you have to do the book, clock and the scoreboard! Still, in the hoop their is no judgement, the ref calls it and you record it. Not so for hits and errors.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
the best part of baseball scorekeeping, is that everyone who does it, for all their obsession with detail, does it a slightly different way. don’t forget to bring your own style to it, and by style i mean consistently repeating the same error in form.
i can only imagine how obsessive the nuts who surround youth sports are for kiddie stats , but it still sounds to me, about as productive as when i played stratomatic baseball, and they demanded that i keep score, such in the manner of pretending we weren’t just shooting craps.
jprfrog
I’ve never been a score-keeper. but I was once dragooned into umpiring a Little-league game (9 and 10 year-olds). There is only one in a game, calling balls and strikes from behind the pitcher, checking foul-balls and ground-rule homers. I knew I was in trouble when the first kid came to bat…he was about 4-foot-6 and his strike zone looked to be about 14 inches high from where I was, 40+ feet away. I also wound up being a consoling coach for a pitcher who was doing his part, but his team-mates were so badly coached that if they managed to field a hit ball, they didn’t seem to know what to do with it. The kid was almost in tears…so why was I the one comforting him? Almost made me want to become a coach, but, thank God, I resisted the impulse.
Little League is a mixed bag; it can be great for the kids or it can be a nightmare. It’s the adults that seem to be most of the problem.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
@Bunt:
lol, hilarious. having once been amongst that crowd i am totally not surprised.
amk
how close are you to nate silver ?
Bill Murray
I with JohnSmith1882, scorekeeping is easy once you get used to how to do it, but you do need to pay attention to do it well, which is why misanthropes do it better. If you hate most everyone and have few friends, you can handle the important jobs like this.
This reminds me I need to update my SABR membership now that the state legislature has passed a 5% bonus for state employees to make up for the three years of no raises. Sometimes the South Dakota legislature does things right (although this was really the Republican governors idea).
J.W. Hamner
My dad taught me to keep score in taking me to mid to late 80’s Orioles games in Memorial Stadium… so I have some fond nostalgic memories of the practice, but never had to deal with angry obsessive sports parents yelling at me if I make a mistake. So that sounds fun. Is there someone who officially determines whether a play is an error or fielder’s choice? Because that seems like a problem area if you have to decide on your own.
Raven
@jprfrog:
“It’s the adults that seem to be most of the problem.”
Absolutely. We had a 18 hour Youth Sports Coaches Training Program that went a long way to helping coaches do a good job working with the kids. When you run these programs you inevitably end up needing coaches as the season approaches. When you offer training the ones who need it the least are the most likely to take it and the ones that need it the most won’t. After a couple of years running programs I started coaching so I made sure I could do what we asked coaches to do.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I’m with stuckinred- let the kids play ball. Spoken as only the one season scorekeeper for the Ensemble Theater rec league team can. Imagine the arguments you can have with drunk
prima donnasactors, tech folk and box office personnel over how you scored the game. Memories.Lawnguylander
I will confirm that keeping score in basketball is way harder and way less fun. I volunteered to do so for my son’s CYO basketball team this season as it was the first team of his that I was not coaching and I wanted to be involved. The game is just too fast paced to accurately keep track of who got that rebound or assist, etc. Once I had to keep the clock and book and that was a nightmare. A father of a kid on the other team came up and complained loudly that I had started the clock too soon after a free throw and I yelled at him to go sit down. That was the first time I’ve ever raised my voice at a youth sporting event. Never again.
Steeplejack
Doesn’t SABR have a hot line that you can call to have a stats nerd rush over and help you out?
g
I love scoring baseball games. I scored for my kids’ LL team. If I go to a ball game, I have to have a scorecard, it feels weird to watch a game without one.
cckids
@Raven:
Ain’t it just? And mostly the parents, not the coaches, who are largely great people. My daughter quit softball a few years ago; she loved playing the game, but wasn’t ready to die on a cross for it, & couldn’t stand how nasty people were to their own kids during & after games. Honestly, they were 10-12 years old; you’d have thought by the parental screaming it was the World Series.
maya
Bring your pitbull with you to the games. If you don’t have one, rent one. They come in handy to keep those angry grannies away, and, you can always blame any scrivener malfunctions on her/him, as in: “The dog ate my score sheet.”
Just be glad it isn’t a cricket match you’re doing.
ErinSiobhan
Oh dear.
I have (so far) managed to avoid this situation by pretending that I don’t know the rules of any sport. Also by volunteering my husband if I get backed into a corner. When faced with a particularly tyrannical manager, I will volunteer to be the team photographer.
dr. bloor
Just show the nearest league official your spiral-bound scoresheet after the first inning. You’ll be on your app in no time.
Trakker
Calm down, calm down.
Just remember that things that initially look very intimidating are almost always, upon closer examination, much worse than you thought. Be sure to show up drunk and less will be expected of you.
cmorenc
@Betty Cracker:
Be VERY GRATEFUL that the “volunteer” role you were a fatal moment slower in taking a step back from than the other parents was COACH of said team. Hoo-boy! That’s exactly how I got backed into becoming a soccer-coach totally ignorant of the sport but for a couple dozen U-9 & U-10 recreational-level games I’d watched my daughter’s team play before the incumbent coaches leaned hard on me to take the team over the following year. I actually did (very eventually) get fairly knowledgeable, good and successful at it after several seasons experience and my third team I took on, but only after the first couple of seasons which in hindsight, were more haplessly incompetent and embarrassing than even they seemed at the time. And I did eventually after six years make a successful (forever) exit from soccer coaching.
During that time, however I did get sucked into soccer refereeing, which I’ve continued for 15 years now; fortunately, that is actually a paying avocation, like getting paid to work out when doing competitive-level games, and I’ve become hard-enough boiled at peanut-gallery critics at games to actually take perverse satisfaction at standing up confidently to it. HOW-EVER, I would advise that unless you have a very strong stomach and can take with composed aplomb parents in the stands barking about your utter blind incompetence, to STEP WAY WAY BACK if your kid’s league starts soliciting volunteers to serve as umpires. Unless that is you’re a bit perverse like I am.
dr. bloor
@Steeplejack:
They have an emergency Geek Squad who will score for you, but you have to listen to their incessant lectures about how the stats you’re collecting aren’t nearly as useful as theirs.
different-church-lady
@dmsilev: No, that won’t work — nobody ever looks at the things afterwards.
What you need to do is ask so many questions so incessantly that they get sick of you by the fifth inning.
I suggest using variations of, “Why is the K backwards?” as a sort of running joke.
WereBear (itouch)
I agree with those urging you to do Tablet or Nothing; say you will mess it up, otherwise!
On a personal note, just slept 12 hours, though not straight, after getting doctor drugs for my sinus infection. It was my first; and I’ve had life threatenng conditions that didn’t bring a fraction of such misery. Only the tooth that started dying at midnight on a weekend was in this league; and at least it had died by dawn. This thing wouldn’t quit.
p.a.
I’ll try to track down Bill James’ number for u.
Tehanu
Tablet, fuck yeah! 21st century, as somebody pointed out. Tell ’em to stick their spiral notebooks you know where!
eldorado
just think how hard it would be if anything ever happened.
Lojasmo
@Betty Cracker:
Yup. Classic abbreviation for stable vital signs is “WNL” …also known as “we never looked”.
Schlemizel
Many of you probably don’t know how hard core fast pitch softball is. The ‘girls’ can play very hard, it is not for the delicate flowers.
Our daughter was a catcher (because she like to be in charge & a good catcher can run the defense). And one little note: I coached boys little league & there were strict rules about avoiding contact if the fielder had the ball or not. Those ‘little girls’ are not given that protection. Our daughter got “Pete Rose’d” by a runner from third. Pete would have been proud of the way the runner put her shoulder into the catcher. It tore my daughters maniscus and kept her on crutches for a month or two.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Schlemizel: Too true. I was quite glad the rec league the Ensemble was in was slow pitch. I’d get drafted into playing on the nights we’d otherwise forfeit for lack of players, and as fit as I was in those days, I was never a very good softball player. And scorekeeping by committee is an interesting concept, especially when part of the committee is from the opposing team when yours in on the field.
Jim C
Betty,
That scoresheet takes me back to high school baseball. I loved the game, but couldn’t play it worth a tinker’s dam. I loved keeping the book. (which, weird or not, is what we called it)
And I truly sympathize if you really don’t know some of that stuff, it can get really frustrating then.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Villago Delenda Est: Haven’t watched baseball much since the 1994 strike–MLB screwed over my favourite team (Montreal Expos) who were on their way to breaking team records for wins and had the league’s best record at the time of the strike.
And two wildcard finishers from each division?…looking at Expos history they would have made the playoffs in 1979, 1980, 1987, 1992, 1993 & 1996 if that had been the format.
The sport punditariat says that the Expos got no fan support in later years. In the late 70s they outdrew the Mets and Yankees. The fans just got sick of being abused in the relationship by both MLB and shitty owners (Jeffrey Loria I’m looking at you!), said “hosties de pourris” and didn’t show up anymore.
Scott
Just have to laugh. Keeping stats is a pain but not as painful as running the scoreboard and then making a mistake and not knowing how to reverse it. With everyone yelling at you to fix it and you keep punching buttons and making it worse. Lots of good memories.
trollhattan
@dmsilev:
I’m liking this, combined with the WW rule. I’m a soccer dad of the stand-on-the-sideline variety. I’m informed soccer has rules, but after five years I don’t understand what they might be. “Offsides”–what the hell?
I may not understand soccer, but it’s cost me thousands in camera gear.
Mnemosyne
@Scott:
Ah, yes, like the time I was roped into running the scoreboard for my brother’s hockey game and they forgot to tell me how to turn off the buzzer at the end of the period. The referee had to skate over and do it for me.
Speaking as the God Mercury
Let me say I am good at such things and will help
Think of winged feet
M
Amir Khalid
@trollhattan:
You’d be surprised how many football pundits — most of them retired legends who get to pontificate at halftime from TV studio sofas — also know sod-all about the laws of a game they’ve been in since they were little boys. Or maybe not.
Yutsano
My mom used to score for my dad’s softball league. She tried to explain it to me once. It might as well have been in ancient Egyptian. And my younger brother is fucking brilliant with all this. I think this explains the law school desire.
Elias
@Scott: I got sucked into running a scoreboard for a football season. What an unhappy experience that turned out to be. Especially when you got the clock screwed up and were frantically trying to fix it while everybody stared at the booth.
HumboldtBlue
I’ll just leave this here as I did at the Roast …
Oh, while I am chuckling, a few tips—as pointed out above use K for strike out unless it was a swinging strikeout then you use a reverse K; walks are BB and my system was 1B for single, 2B for double, 3B for triple and HR for the dinger and FC for fielder’s choice which is when the defensive player throws to a base other than first to record an out and the batter reaches safely, unless of course it’s a passed ball wild pitch or a dropped third strike (they also affect stolen bases) which have their won codes and of course you’ll have to determine whether or not a run scored was an earned run or an unearned run becsue you don’t want grandma AND grandpa (who played two seasons with the Single-A South Mollyswamp Macaroons in 1967) on your ass for runining li’l Heather’s ERA and that of course, leads us to RBI including whether or not the run scored on a fielder’s choice, an error a batted ball or a sacrifice.
That leaves us with the infield fly rule but enough of pedantics for all love.
Uncle Cosmo
Jeebus Cripes, peeps, beisbol scoring isn’t rocket science (though it ain’t zackly bottle-rocket science either). This for the benefit of Ms Crackuh:
There is only 1 thing you are doing while keeping score: Tracking the fate of each batter (do they reach base, how far around do they get) as s/he comes up to bat. (In the process of doing this you also keep track of what the pitcher and the fielders are doing–you don’t even have to think about it separately.)
There are really only 2 things you need to know in order to do this:
1) The reason each box in the main section looks like a diamond is so you can draw a line from home to 1st to 2nd to 3rd to home as the hitter (who’s listed in the leftmost column) progresses around the bases. If the hitter reaches first base, you use the pencil to draw the line between home & first; if & when s/he makes it to second, ditto. In the triangular space outside the baseline you note the reason that the hitter (later the baserunner) advanced.
2) Fielders are identified by the number of the positions they play: 1 = pitcher, 2 = catcher, then from 1st to 3rd & then from LF to RF (except that the Shortstop is 6). When the hitter (later baserunner) makes an out on the way to a base, you code the reason for it in the space where you would have drawn the line if s/he had made it. A force out from the shortstop to the first baseman is coded 6-3; a fly out is prefaced by F (advanced scorers use P for popups & L for linedrive outs), so a fly out to the right fielder is written F9. A strikeout is a K (backwards K if the 3rd strike is swinging).
The one thing to remember is that so long as a runner is still on base you have to keep updating his/her progress.
The other thing is that you have to keep updating the lineup (the lefthand column) as players are replaced in the batting order. This can be a pain if a lot of changes are being made.
So welcome to the wonderful world of scoring, BC. A well-kept scoresheet is a thing of beauty & a fabulous memory aid–my dad (a former semipro shortstop who taught me how) could pull out one from 40 years earlier & read off the course of the game in great dramatic detail.
Trakker
@Thor Heyerdahl: Damn, now I feel bad (well, sort of) for celebrating your franchise’s move to my baseball-less city, a city that has lost even more baseball franchises than Montreal. I’m sure you’ll agree, MLB cares only about revenue not fans.
pacified
hooray for base/soft ball!
Jim Gauuan
Team mom/dad is easier unless the other parents are assholes. I coach Hs softball and prefer to keep my own book rather than teach someone. Announced and kept the book for my little league just to score the home made pasta and snow cone.
asiangrrlMN
Oh, Betty. Even as I sympathize with you, I’m snickering at your vivid and hilarious vitriol. You should have asked us at Balloon Juice! We could have told you how complex it can be. You are in my thoughts. ::bows head::
Betty Cracker
@Uncle Cosmo: I was seated behind the fence near home plate entering the rosters when you posted this comment, but you are 100% correct to note that it makes more sense if you just focus on tracking each batter’s progress. Once I started seeing it that way, it was less of a mystery, and I pulled it off pretty well.
A couple of times when lots of plays were happening simultaneously, I had to appeal to my fellow spectators to figure out what just happened and record it all. I wont describe the panic that ensued when my pencil lead broke. But all’s well that ends well, and I won’t be nearly so panicky next time.
Thanks to all for your advice, humor and encouragement.
oddcoach
not being a “baseball person” when my son began playing, the scoring complexity didn’t even occur to me until I saw someone doing it and saw the scoresheet. Holy Crap; no way was I getting involved in that. I’m the heavy in the dug-out. Someone has to keep the boys from climbing the fence, swinging the bats, and stomping on the metal benches. Turns out I’m pretty good at yelling at little boys.