Keeping score at a baseball game in person

What do you need to bring to keep score at a game?

Six things. The last two are the ones people learn about the hard way.

• A scorecard or a scorebook. The card the team sells inside is often good, but it is one game and it is loose paper. A bound book solves the writing surface, the wind and the storage at once, and keeps this game beside every other one you have scored.
• Two pencils. Not one. You will drop the first between innings, it will go under the seat in front of you, and that row will stand up for a beer run before you can reach down. A short pencil with a good eraser beats a mechanical one, which jams in the seventh.
• A hard backing or a small clipboard. A loose card on a bare knee gives you wavering lines and a hole where the pencil went through. A folded program works. Check the venue’s bag rules first, because they differ and they change.
• A way to check the lineup. This item does the most work. You want both batting orders, and later the substitutions — the one thing you cannot reconstruct from watching is who came in for whom.
• Sunscreen and a hat for a day game. Sun on white paper is genuinely hard to read, and a brim solves the glare as much as the burn. Three hours in an afternoon seat is long when both hands are full.
• Something to weigh the page down. A binder clip on the outer edge, or a rubber band around the book. Ballpark wind arrives as one gust at the wrong moment, turns the page mid at-bat, and drags graphite across the fifth inning.

Before first pitch

Copy both lineups down while you still have a signal and the concourse crowd has not arrived. Thirty minutes early, not five. Names, spots one through nine, positions, both starting pitchers. Write the position number beside each name too, so you are not translating in the second inning.

This one habit separates a finished card from an abandoned one. With nine names down on each side, you start every at-bat knowing whose row you are in, and a play you miss is one blank cell you can fill later. Copy names off the scoreboard between pitches instead and you are behind in the first. You miss a play while writing a name, then miss the next one looking up the first. By the fourth the card has more gaps than marks, and that is the card people give up on.

The three things you will miss

Not might. Will. Experienced scorers miss these too; they just have a plan for each.

• The defensive substitution nobody announces clearly. A new left fielder jogs out between innings, the announcement goes up under a music cue, and the scoreboard does not change. Glance at the field before each half-inning and count. If somebody is new, mark the margin with the inning even without a name — “new LF, top 6” is a question you can answer later.
• The mid-inning pitching change where you catch the new pitcher but miss which batter he entered on. You watched the mound conference, you got the name, and then you could not recall whose count was whose. Draw the pitcher-change line across the row you are in right now, before anything else. One row off is a small correction later. Reconstructing it is not.
• The hit-or-error call that is not obvious from the upper deck. A ball skips off the shortstop’s glove and from two hundred feet up you cannot tell whether he should have had it. The official scorer sometimes changes the ruling the next day anyway. Pencil in what you believe, circle it lightly, keep going, and reconcile between innings.

Where is the best place to sit to keep score?

Behind the plate is the scorer’s seat, and not for the view of the pitcher. The whole field lies in front of you, so you can watch a fielder move before the pitch and still see where the ball lands. The position numbers also fall the way you picture them: 7 on your left, 9 on your right, the infield laid across your view like the diagram in your head. Height matters little — the upper deck behind home scores better than a low seat down the line.

A seat down a foul line distorts fly balls. From the first-base side, a ball to right field comes almost straight at you and depth disappears — a routine fly and a ball off the wall look identical until a fielder reacts. You score body language instead of the ball.

The outfield is hardest, and not because of the distance. Your mental map is reversed. You look back at the plate, so left field is on your right and the diamond runs away from you rather than across you. Every play costs an extra beat of translation, and that is what puts you behind.

One trade nobody mentions: a rail in front of your seat, or a wide flat armrest, is worth more to a scorer than ten rows closer. You need somewhere for the book that is not your lap. Take the rail.

When the wifi dies

Assume it will. A full ballpark is tens of thousands of phones in a few acres, and the middle innings are the worst of it. The pattern is predictable: usable before first pitch, unreliable from about the third through the seventh, better once people start leaving.

So front-load the part that needs a connection. Get both lineups down before first pitch. Then score from what you can see, which is most of it, and leave a blank cell rather than stopping. Between innings, when a bar comes back, fill the gaps and check the substitutions. If the signal never returns, you still have a card.

One honest note about apps, this one included. A web app that installs to your home screen keeps its shell working offline — it opens, and it does not fail at the gate. But live data is live data. Lineups, substitutions and inning totals come over the network, and no app can show you a substitution it never fetched. Get the information early, and treat the rest as a bonus.