I like scoring baseball games. I can remember my Dad scoring baseball games when I was a kid. At the time I thought it was boring. “What’s the point?” I wondered. But, years later, I got it. Scoring baseball games is fun, and holding a completed scorecard at the end of the game is amazingly satisfying. A few years ago, when I heard the San Diego Padres would no longer be handing out free scorecards at their games, I decided to design my own.
© Adam Moyer 2024
“Keeping score is merely improving opportunity. The fan who fails to do it misses half the game. Most spectators watch a great play with an interest which, however intense, is forgotten in the thriller of the next inning. They leave the grounds with a hazy idea of a rather enjoyable afternoon, whose main features are scarce refreshed by reading the press accounts of them some hours later. Keeping score remedies all this. It burns the play into memory. It greatly increases the spectator’s knowledge of the game. It increases to just that degree his or her pleasure in watching a contest. And, best of all, it is a pleasure in itself, not the disagreeable thing it seems. A few simple rules, practice—and keeping score becomes second nature to the fan.”
C.P. Stack
Baseball Magazine
May 1914