Baseball scorekeeping

Baseball scorekeeping is the practice of recording the details of a baseball game as it unfolds. Professional baseball leagues hire official scorers to keep an official record of each game (from which a box score can be generated), but many fans keep score as well for their own enjoyment. Scorekeeping is usually done on a printed scorecard and, while official scorers must adhere precisely to one of the few different scorekeeping notations, most fans exercise some amount of creativity and adopt their own symbols and styles.

Sportswriter Henry Chadwick is generally credited as the inventor of baseball scorekeeping. His basic scorecard and notation have evolved significantly since their advent in the 1870s but they remain the basis for most of what has followed.

Some symbols and abbreviations are shared by nearly all scorekeeping systems. For example, the position of each player is indicated by a number:

The designated hitter (DH), if used, is marked using a zero (0).

Scorecards vary in appearance but almost all share some basic features, including areas for:

Usually two scorecards (one for each team) are used to score a game.

Because the traditional method has been in use for so long, it has the most variations in its symbols and syntax. It is difficult, at this point in time, to describe an "authoritative" set of rules for traditional scorekeeping, but what is described here is a representative sample.

In the traditional method, each cell in the main area of the scoresheet represents the "lifetime" of an offensive player, from at-bat to baserunner, to being put out or scoring a run.

When an out is recorded, the combination of defensive players executing that out is recorded. For example:

If a batter reaches first base, either due to a walk, a hit, or an error, the basepath from home to first base is drawn, and the method described in the lower-righthand corner. For example:

When a runner advances due to a following batter, it can be noted by the batting position or the uniform number of the batter that advanced the runner. This kind of information is not always included by amateur scorers, and there is a lot of variation in notation. For example:

The scorecard on the right describes the August 8, 2000 game between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Francisco Giants, played at Pacific Bell Park, in San Francisco. The scorecard describes the following events in the top of the 1st inning:

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