How to read a baseball box score and a line score

What is a line score, and what do R, H and E mean?

Two rows, one per team, with the visiting team on top because the visiting team bats first. Across each row are the innings, and the number in each cell is the runs that team scored in that half-inning. Nothing else goes there. Extra innings simply add columns.

At the right end sit three totals, always in this order: R for runs, H for hits, E for errors. R is the final score. H will not match it, because hits do not have to score and runs do not have to come from hits.

A dash or an X often appears in the home team’s ninth. It means the home team did not bat. If they already lead after the top of the ninth, there is nothing left to play for, so the cell is marked rather than filled with a 0, which would claim they batted and scored nothing.

The E column misleads people. Errors are a fielding statistic. They sit beside runs and hits, but they do not change the score, and they are charged to the team in the field, not the team at bat. A team can commit three errors and win comfortably. E tells you how the defense held up, and nothing about who won.

The hitters’ columns

One row per batter, in batting order, with substitutes indented under the player they replaced.

Under the batting table sits a block of detail lines: 2B, 3B, HR, RBI, SB, CS, GIDP, LOB, often E with the fielder named. They exist because the table collapses every hit into one H column. The 2B line names who doubled; the HR line names who homered and how many runners were on.

What an at-bat is not

The most common confusion in a box score is the gap between plate appearances and at-bats. A plate appearance is every trip to the plate. An at-bat is the narrower subset used as the denominator of batting average.

A walk is not an at-bat. Neither is a hit by pitch, a sacrifice bunt, a sacrifice fly, nor reaching on catcher’s interference. A hitter who comes up five times, walks twice and singles once is 1-for-3, and his average goes up.

The reasoning is that batting average measures what a batter did with a chance to hit, and these outcomes are either not an attempt to hit or an attempt to give himself up. It is also why the statistic understates a patient hitter, and why on-base percentage exists. OBP puts walks and hit by pitches back in, on both sides of the fraction.

The pitchers’ columns

One row per pitcher, in the order they appeared. The decision — win, loss, save, hold — is printed beside the name.

What does 5.2 innings pitched mean?

An innings-pitched figure of 5.2 does not mean five and two tenths. It means five innings and two outs. The digit after the point counts outs, and an inning holds three, so it only ever takes the values 0, 1 and 2.

So 5.2 is five and two-thirds innings, and 6.1 is six and one third. A pitcher who records one more out after 5.2 does not go to 5.3. He goes to 6.0.

The consequence is that the decimal is not arithmetic. 5.2 plus 3.2 is not 9.4; it is nine and one third, written 9.1. Convert to outs, add, convert back. Rate statistics use the true fraction, so 5.2 innings is divided by 5.667, not by 5.2.

Earned and unearned runs

A box score charges a pitcher with runs twice, in R and in ER. The idea behind the split is that a pitcher should be judged on the runs he was responsible for, not the ones his defense handed over. An unearned run is one that would not have scored had the defense played the half-inning cleanly — without an error or a passed ball.

The plain case is easy to picture. A batter reaches on an error and later scores. He should have been out, so the run appears in R but not in ER, and the pitcher’s earned run average is untouched by it.

Beyond that it is genuinely complicated, and it is worth saying so. Deciding which runs are earned means reconstructing the inning as it would have gone without the misplay: who would still have reached, who would still have scored, and when the third out would have come. That reconstruction has detailed rules of its own, and the official scorer makes judgement calls inside them — starting with whether a difficult play was an error at all or simply a hit. Two scorers can differ, and a ruling is sometimes changed after the game.

So a pitcher’s ERA may not match the runs you watched him give up, and that is not a mistake in the box score. Because the split rests on a human decision, ER is a softer number than the ones beside it.

What does a box score not tell you?

A box score is a summary, and every summary throws something away. What it throws away is sequence.

Take two batting lines from one game. The first reads 4-for-4, four singles, no runs batted in. The second reads 1-for-4 with a three-run double. By batting average the first is the better day. But four singles with nobody on base moved nothing, and one double with the bases occupied changed the game.

The same applies to pitchers. Six innings and three runs hides whether the three came in a quick first-inning burst or a slow bleed in the sixth with the game on the line. Leverage is nowhere in the columns.

Luck is missing too. A line drive caught at the wall and a soft ground ball that finds a gap appear as 0-for-1 and 1-for-1. Over one game that noise is loud; over a season it quiets, which is why season figures sit beside the day’s.

Closing that gap is what the newer statistics are for. WAR, wRC+, FIP and BABIP account for context and for the share of an outcome a player controlled. They have their own page.