by Pj Cioffi

Created on: July 23, 2008

Backwards K. LOB. 4-6-3. F-9. What the heck is this, rules for Battleship? Half a game of Bingo? A course in hieroglyphics? Nope, it's some of the crazy coding needed for scoring a baseball game, handed down to us 100 years ago, and mostly unchanged to this day. And, if you have any interest in figuring out how well you, a teammate an opposing player is doing, keeping score is the only way to gather vital statistics, which, when compiled over time will determine if you're a hall of famer or someone who should sit on the bench.

But I get ahead of myself. Baseball is a long game, and a scorecard generally takes up one side of a piece of paper. To make sure all the information is gathered accurately, abbreviations are quite necessary. The left side of the page will have the team's lineup, which lists the battisng order of the team and the positions they are playing. The visiting team, who bat first, will be listed on the top, the home team, or the team batting second will be on the bottom. It's best to leave one space below each player for substitutions. The batter order is very important, because it cannot be changed once the game begins. If someone bats out of order and an alert scorekeeper catches it, the batter is automatically out.

On the right side of the scorecard is a row of small boxes with a tiny baseball diamond on it. There are 10 columns of these numbers - 1 for each inning and one for extra innings. An expert scorekeeper can look at a correctly completed scorecard and tell almost every detail just by looking at it. But before you can start scoring, you need to know a few abbreviations.

Abbreviations
All positions have a number value attached to them. (This has nothing to do with the numbers on their jerseys). Pitcher is 1, catcher is 2, first base is 3, second is 4, third base is 5, shortstop is 6, left field is 7, center is 8, and right field is 9.

Other important abbreviations are 1B - single, 2B - double, 3B - triple, HR - homerun, BB walk (otherwise known as base on balls) K-strikeout (forward means struck out swinging, backwards means struck out looking), FC - fielder's choice, DP - double play, S - sacrifice bunt, SF - sacrifice fly.

First inning example
So, instead of trying to write all this detail in a box which is about 1 inch by 1 inch square, we abbreviate. The first batter in inning one hits a ground ball to the shortstop who throws to first to get the out. All you need to do is write 6-3. No need to write ground out - we can see that the shortstop

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