Keeping Score

For the last couple of years, I've been "bench mom" for Smunch's baseball team. With a bunch of squirrely boys under the age of 8, this takes a lot of organizational skill and an inordinate amount of patience that I didn't always have. This year, I'm managing Mam's softball team, so I'm not even going to make it to all of the Saturday baseball games. And, although I have enough experience to handle the bench job, I don't really want to do it again. So, I volunteered myself and Daddy to be the official scorekeepers of the team. Sound easy enough? Think again.I thought this would be an easy, if important, job. I mean, how hard can it be to keep track of the score, right? But, of course, it's a lot more involved than just keeping track of the number of runs. It's also the number of balls, strikes, pitches, singles, doubles, triples. There's so much writing to do that it's hard to keep track of the game and write at the same time.

Of course, most of these statistics are completely meaningless at this level. The kids get 5 balls pitched to them. Most are not called balls or strikes. It's just a pitch...and honestly, when it comes to our team and our coach pitcher, many, many of them are balls. The kids were batting at some of the pitches as though they were playing tennis rather than baseball. To be fair, the other team's players sometimes looked like they were playing golf.

Yesterday, Daddy and I both scored the game independently. It was an amusing little venture, since neither of us were very good at it. Daddy was using an iPhone app. I, being ever the paper-loving Luddite, was using pencil and paper. The cool thing about scoring is that the game goes a lot faster when you're scrambling to keep up with pitches and batters. On the downside, it's a little demoralizing to be recording how your team was done after 3 batters struck out/grounded out while the other team was done with their at-bat due to the 5-run rule.

I'm all over the sort of minutia, so I'm happy with this volunteer job, although it puts a serious crimp in my socializing baseball mom style!