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On Scorecards
I went to a Cubs game on Friday, and I had an inordinate amount of fun keeping a scorecard.
We often listen to the games, so we get to hear Pat Hughes, recent winner of the Ford C. Frick Award and inductee into Cooperstown call the game. He’s so great, a consummate performer, storyteller, and baseball journalist. You can buy copies of his scorecards for the 2016 NLCS and the unbelievable game 7 of the 2016 World Series, when the Cubs finally won, after a rain delay, ten innings, and 108 years. He and Ron Coomer often talk about how to score a play after it’s over, whether it was a hit by the offense or an error by the defense. This thing, this souvenir almost as old as the game itself, has this sense of an artifact. I had never done one before, so when we got to Wrigley a little early I ducked into the Cubs shop and bought one. It cost two dollars and came with a free pencil.
First of all, how awesome is this cover:
Program art designed by Otis Shepard in 1941 They have a little gallery of Otis and Dorothy Shepard’s clean and colorful design work from the 1940’s on the second floor of the Cubs store.
My scoring of the Cubs/Royals game It’s not so much a scorecard as a log, and once you learn the shorthand, you can write a very detailed story of exactly what happened in every play, for the whole game.
You start by listing the starting lineup for each team, in batting order. The visiting team is at the top of the page, they bat first. It helps to have their numbers and positions, so you can keep track of who does what. (Of course, you can also get all this information by watching the gigantic video screens, the actual scoreboard, and if necessary you can also get the recap from the MLB app, but it’s cooler to get it from watching the actual players.) We got there a little early so I had the chance to fill all this in before the first pitch.
But once the game is underway, you just work down and to the right, writing what each player did, in the row of the player’s name and the column of the inning. If he gets a hit, you draw a line for the path to the base he got to, and as other players get hits, you advance the baserunner and fill in his path behind him. When he scores, you color in the little diamond.
When a batter gets out, you mark how it happened. Fly out? An F and the number of the position he hit to. Strikeouts are K’s, and called strikeouts, like when Cody Bellinger got a third strike called on him to end the game because the umpire thought his swing broke the plane, are a backwards K. Getting all the numbers of the players involved in a play can be a trick–you can see in the bottom of the fourth inning, Christopher Morel got caught in a rundown between third and home. I marked it as 1-3-5-4 because that’s how I caught all the players who had to throback and forth to get Madrigal the hitter and then get Morel.
It’s kind of a marvel of information design. By the end of the game, you can see how well each player did at a glance. And if you were careful during the game you can pretty much reconstruct it, almost pitch by pitch, from your little squiggles.
I found I also paid a lot closer attention. Once you get started, you really want to get everything, and not have to enter “WW” (for “wasn’t watching”) into any of your squares. And it was two bucks! If you like baseball, information design, and geeking out, next time you’re at the ballpark stop in the souvenir shop and get a scorecard.
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Screen time offsets
Like many people this time of year, I am looking for ways to be more mindful about my device usage. I found this delightful article “In Search of Lost Screen Time”.
In 2018 those 253 million Americans spent $1,380 and 1,460 hours on their smartphone and other mobile devices.
It goes on to describe some of the things you could do with all that time and money.
In most Western states, that $1,380 you spent on your phone could buy half an acre of land. In the right conditions, that half acre could easily accommodate 150 trees. A single tree sequesters 48 pounds of carbon a year. It takes about 30 minutes for an amateur forester to plant a tree. If every American smartphone owner used that time and money to plant half an acre of trees, we would sequester about 886 million tons of carbon a year, enough to offset more than 10 percent of the country’s annual emissions. If you don’t want to do the planting yourself, the National Forest Foundation says it could meet all of its planting goals if every smartphone user gave it just 60 cents.
And:
Every year 10 million tons of plastic waste flows into the ocean. According to George Leonard of the Ocean Conservancy, if Americans applied all the money they allocate to smartphones to solving plastic pollution, “There would be enough money available to pay for the necessary improvements in waste management in Asian countries for 70 years.” And if the time Americans spent on smartphones were applied to ocean clean up at a rate of five pounds of plastic garbage per person per hour, “The volunteer effort could clean up the amount of plastic that flows into the global ocean 118 times over.”
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Hello again
I used to have a blog at this address, long ago. I am starting it again. This is a work in progress. There will be loose threads here and there. Thanks for reading.
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