The Sunday Memory Drawer - Always Know The Score

In the pandemic year of 2020, my Dodger tote bag sits on a shelf in my closet. It goes to every game with me.   In there are pens, a Dodger cap, an old rally towel (in case my seat is dirty), and my binoculars.   

Oh, yeah.   And the most important object.   My score book.

If inanimate objects could have thoughts, I wonder what my score book must be thinking.

"Winter is long gone.   Why aren't you using me?   Have you found a better score book?"

No, I haven't.   Indeed, the last game recorded...the NLDS loss to the Nationals in Game 5...will still be the last game recorded when I hopefully open the book next spring.

I miss it.   I suppose I could keep score for a game on TV.   But that's not the same thing.   The calming influence of maintaining a score book at a baseball stadium is as wonderful as a new drug on the market.

In past seasons at Dodger Stadium, there would be at least one game where I feel a tap on my left shoulder.  It would be one of their roving camera guys, entrusted to running around the park and looking for things to put up on Diamond Vision.  

"I want to get a shot of you writing in your score book."

Okay, this is the same guy that shot me once the year before and another time the year before that.

"It's such a lost art that I want people to know about that."

Okay.  So Spielberg Junior would always hear my ground rules.  No facial shot. If you get part of my hand making a notation in the book, that's fine.  But that's as far as I go when it comes to being on a High-Def TV screen several stories high.

The last time this happened (you see it at the top of today's post), we got a bit coordinated with my 15 seconds of fame.  When the light went on the camera and my penmanship was illuminated for almost 50,000 to see, my friend took a snapshot of it to preserve the historical moment.  The camera dude thanked me.

"I wish more people scored games like you do."

Yeah, me, too.  

And I've been doing it since I was ten.

It was the very first time I walked into Shea Stadium, home of my beloved New York Mets.  There was a vendor at the entrance to our field box section.

"Scorecard, here, get ya scorecard."

I asked my father what that was.  After all, it was being sold at the ballpark so it must be important.  I needed to do all the things the other fans were doing.  

My dad plunked down his quarter...yes, a quarter...and I got a little free pencil as a bonus.  I was all set.

Of course, my father was no help when it came to what the hell I should be doing with the scorecard.  He had never done it.  But, luckily, there was a nifty page in the back that explained it all.

HOW TO SCORE.

Got it.  I quickly learned which players were which numbers and how to make notations for base hits, pop outs, walks, and strikeouts.  Years later, I dug out this scorecard and it was a fifth-grade graduate's mess.   Full of mistakes and cross outs.  There was no eraser on that little tiny pencil.  

Still, there must have been some sort of magic to it all because I never really stopped scoring a game.  Somehow, it ties me to the event and that moment in time like no other memory.  So, throughout my baseball life, I kept score.   In high school.   Through college.  Amidst good times and bad.  Decent Met teams and horrible ones.  There was one constant.

Me and a scorecard.

Eventually, I got a little more high-tech.  Instead of buying a scorecard for a quarter or two dollars or later ten dollars,  I invested in a scorebook that contained room for thirty or so games.   

I have no idea how I originally came across Gene Elston's Stati-Score Baseball Scorebook.   I know I've always had to buy it mail order, purchasing three or four at a time.  Elston is a longtime Houston Astros announcer.   He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for broadcasting back in 2006.  He left us in 2015.  

The man had no idea how important his concoction has been to me.  

Starting back in the 80s and going to Met games when it was fashionable and relevant to do so, I exclusively used this score book.  I'd fill up thirty games, stash the book in the closet, and then start a new one.  This was a particularly ingenious invention at the time because it included a place to keep pitch 
counts.  This was at a time when nobody kept pitch counts.  These days, it's done for you on the scoreboard.  Back in our day, it was done by yours truly and my frequent Shea compatriot, the Bibster.

There we would sit in my Loge seats or his.  Pencils in hand.  Marking down balls and strikes diligently.   Each with our own score books.  It was baseball nerdism to the Nth degree.   We didn't care.   With our score books, we were clearly the smartest people in Shea Stadium, not counting, of course, Tim McCarver behind the Mets broadcast microphone.

And the score book went on the road.   For five summers, my college roommate and I would do a weekend in the friendly confines of Chicago's Wrigley Field when the Mets were there.   The book was on my lap.   One year, we were seated next to a couple of girls who were great to look at but horrible to keep up with when it came to downing Old Style Beer.  One of them was really impressed by my...score book.

"Hey, Stats, what did the last guy do at bat?"

I'd always have the answer.   The only problem was that she was unconscious in her seat two innings later.

During the 1988 playoffs, I was keeping pitch counts when the Mets were battling...gasp...the Dodgers in Game 4.  Dwight Gooden had a lead going into the ninth inning but, as I tallied up his balls and strikes, I was sure he had thrown way too many pitches to be effective much longer.  The closer was warming up in the bullpen.  

I circled the pitch count total at the top of the page.  And added the following notation.

TAKE HIM OUT!!!

Manager Davey Johnson didn't.  One meatball served to Dodger Mike Scioscia and the Mets were on their way to not playing in the World Series.

TAKE HIM OUT!!!

Several years ago, when I was doing a charity stint on KABC's Dodger Talk, I got to meet the host and all-around good guy Josh Suchon.  He was writing a book on those 1988 Dodgers and, most particularly, from the perspective of being an Oakland Athletics fan.  Of course, the A's got pummeled by the Dodgers in the World Series.  I mentioned my score book and recalled the notation I made.  He wanted to see it for possible inclusion in the book.

The next time I was in NY, I went into the file cabinet where all these baseball records are kept.   The green score books spilled out onto the floor as I dug through them, looking for this one game.  Sure enough, the game was uncovered and the notation, not made in invisible ink, was there.  Josh ultimately didn't use it in the book.  But it allowed me, for the very first time, to revisit my baseball fandom and life.  I had never really revisited a book after it was retired.

I found it all.   Years and years and years of memories.  Some spectacular and others mundane.  But it was clearly the remnants of a life.  Solely and distinctly mine.

I now have a box full of these green score books in my LA apartment.  Whenever I go east for a Met game, my most current record keeper is packed along with my socks and my toiletries.  Two coasts of baseball serviced by one score book.

I'm thinking the Houston warehouse where they are housed is getting emptier with each order.  The last batch I got were a little brown around the edges.  Sadly, there's probably not a bottomless pit when it comes to Gene Elston's Stati-Score Baseball Scorebook. There might not be many people ordering them anymore.  Heck, I might be the last one.

But, I will keep on doing it.  A work colleague who saw my score book emblazoned on the big screen asked me to teach him how to score a game.

Gladly.

Because, after all, it is a lost art.  But, it's also...my art.

But, even so, for 2020, the art is unfortunately lost.   For a while.

Dinner last night:  General Tso's Chicken from Mandarette.