The Weekly Screed (#814)

“Keeping a book”
by David Benjamin

“A neighbor had a score sheet from the last game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers. He recalled the whole game inning by inning, just looking at the scorecard. It was almost like watching a rabbi read scripture. Here he was recalling the whole game. It was kind of magic.”
                    — Paul Dickson, The Joy of Keeping Score

MADISON, Wis.— At the ballpark yesterday, a passing Red Sox fan noticed the scorebook I’d been marking (and occasionally messing up) all through the game. “That’s great,” he said. “I haven’t seen anyone keeping a book for years.”

I said, “Well, thanks,” and “Go, Sox.”

Poets and pundits and have said much and written more about the arcane art of keeping score, on a sheet, or in a spiral-bound book full of fine lines and boxes and six-point type. They praise the book’s power to perfectly recover a long-past moment. They talk about how the act of scoring epitomizes a game so intellectually demanding that it has a written cipher all its own.

Tom Boswell, in the Washington Post, once wrote, “No other American sport has anything that genuinely approximates the scorecard — that single piece of paper, simple enough for a child — that preserves the game both chronologically and in toto with almost no significant loss of detail.”

For me, keeping score has always been a form of therapy. I tend, especially when it’s the Red Sox — especially when they play the Yankees — to get a little jumpy. However, when I’m  keeping an eagle eye on every ball in play and recording its fate, in code, in its own square in the holy book, accurately and legibly (so my grandchildren can someday relive the game), I attain a tenuous serenity that wouldn’t be possible without a pen in my hand.

I know, I know. I should use a pencil.

Scoring has another salutary effect, lately even more important. Ballparks nowadays are infested by fans who can’t seem to focus. They thrive, normally, in a breakneck realm of sound bites and “instant messaging,” of 20-second, 10-second, five-second bleats, tweets, hoots, texts, sexts and vanishing photos. For one such twitchy spectator, the leisurely and thoughtful progress of nine innings on the diamond can be more ordeal than pleasure. Most contemporary stadium operators, aware of this disease, provide evanescent stimuli. A ballpark visit brings down a barrage of diversions, shiny objects and assaults to the senses. Among the distractions, you get dot races, “kiss cams,” t-shirt cannons, quiz games and the odd aerial bomb, all of it scored relentlessly, at 100 decibels, by — for some reason — a medley of the most godawful pop songs recorded between 1970 and 1990.

At the ballpark I visited yesterday, Miller Park in Milwaukee, the piece de resistance of the non-baseball mishegoss is a daily sausage race, run by costumed minions of the Miller Brewing Co. It’s cute, it’s commercial, and Max Patkin is rolling in his grave. Preoccupied with my scorebook, I missed it. Had to check the giant TV above the outfield to see who’d won (Italian sausage).

Admittedly, after a couple of years between live games, I was a little rusty. Early on, I had to cross out an at-bat recorded in the wrong box. Later, I added a question mark to a double-play in which the Brewers second-sacker fumbled a low liner but then doubled up a Sox baserunner who scurried back to first just as the first baseman was catching the throw, at which point the batter belatedly met the runner and the first baseman there, along with the relevant umpire, prompting the Sox first-base coach to join the crowd and starting hollering in a what-the-hell? sort of way. Hence, my notation, which isn’t so much a question (I know the answer), but a spontaneous diacritic in tribute to the play’s lovable, bumbling weirdness.

Elswhere in the book, I had to overwrite a mistaken “4-3” (groundball to second base), with “6-3” (grounder to the shortstop) — because of the Beer family.

The Beer family, as Gaylord and I got to know them, are the kind of easygoing Wisconsinites who — in their leisure time — never think of doing more than one thing at a time. So, right around the bottom of the second inning, they all got up to hit the concourse, for beer. This forced their whole row to stand up and let them pass, thus blocking the field from everyone in the three or four rows behind. This “obstructed view” lasted for the better part of a minute, as the entire Beer family squeezed through the narrow passage allowed between seat-rows by the thrifty folks at the Miller Brewing Co. Two or three outs later, the Beer family, now provisioned (loyally) with cans of Miller Lite, trooped unanimously back to their seats, blacking out the game (locally) for another 45 to 60 seconds.

Inevitably, about five outs later on average, the Beer family — having drained their cans — needed to evacuate. So, up again, inching their way toward the Men’s. (The Beer family left its women at home, another Dairyland tradition.) A few outs later, they returned, beerless. They hadn’t thought to load up while tending to their bladders.

Of course, a mere half-inning hence, the Beer clan sensed a mounting, importunate thirst for another seven bucks (each) worth of Miller Lite. So, “Excuse us. Sorry.” “No, it’s okay.” “Well, thanks.” “Hey, no problem, pal. Go, Brewers.”

Eventually, during one Beer-family blackout, there occurred a groundball, unseen. I guessed 4-3. Gaylord gently corrected that to 6-3, leaving an ugly blemish on my sheet. There’s a relevant passage about Yankees broadcaster Phil Rizzuto, in Paul Dickson’s book, The Joy of Keeping Score. Once in a while, on the Scooter’s scorecard appeared the mysterious abbreviation, “WW.”

This stood for “wasn’t watching.”

Baseball had to devise a scoring system and code more elaborate than any other sport because it’s the essential game of situations. “Action” can disappear for hours. Baseball’s long ebbs can lull you into a pleasant stupor that sends the mind wandering, toward your personal sea of troubles, or over to the aisle to watch that girl, descending the steps in shorts so short they might constitute a felony in Utah.

Yesterday, the Red Sox starter, a Jekyll-and-Hyde lefty named Rodriguez, got into one of those rhythms that rendered him, for thirteen straight at-bats, untouchable. The Brewers were hapless. Every out was a can of corn.

But then, from a slough of tranquility, a moment explodes so sudden, convulsive, transcendent that you sit back, smiling, and forget that you’re holding a pen and trying to keep track. So it went, in the 9th inning of a 1-1 pitcher’s duel from which, alas, the dueling hurlers had been already removed. The marvelously named Red Sox rightfielder, Mookie Betts, timed a 98 mph fastball from Neftali Feliz and powdered it — you knew it was gone when you heard the crack — in a low-arcing white contrail deep into the left-field bleachers.

“HR, 3bi, R.”

If you can read a scorecard, whether from yesterday or 1927, you can discern the game’s interplay of right and wrong, of injustice and vindication. It ain’t fair, for example, that the starters, Rodriguez and Jimmy Nelson, left without a decision. Nothing won, nothing lost. Just few numbers strung out under IP, H, BB, SO, and nary an HBP. But each pitcher, by ruining his arm for the next three days, kept his team in the game. Only baseball has a notation for the word “sacrifice.”

The scorecard illuminates how hard Nelson worked, throwing 108 pitches to get 19 outs. It shows that Feliz was overmatched from the moment he stepped on the mound, and that Betts was a bolt of lightning waiting to strike.

It’s all there, in the book, even the anticlimax. That’s when Sox closer Craig Kimbrel, kept in the game by something called a double-switch, struck out five Brewers so brutally that you thought of little kids, blindfolded at a birthday picnic, attacking a piñata with a broomstick.

I marked Kimbrel’s last “K” with a star. Had to.