Why keeping score is the best way to watch baseball

Every October, some eagle-eyed fan at a baseball stadium will snap a surreptitious photo of a fan in the stands with a pencil in hand, and, on their lap, a paper with a grid covered in diamonds and dots and dashes.

Usually (but not always!) they’re on the other side of 60. In the photos, they’ll be scribbling away, blissfully focused on that grid while everyone else around them collapses into raucous cheers. The captions on social media are always variations on the same theme: “Wow, can’t believe someone is still keeping score!”

These are my people.

Keeping score by hand is the best way to watch a baseball game — the only way for me — and, to my eternal chagrin, hardly anyone does it anymore.

Here’s how it works: On a 9-by-9 grid, a scorekeeper logs almost everything that happens in a game, in a shorthand that’s more than 150 years old. You scratch a diagonal slash for a single, and fill in a diamond for a home run. In the field, every player is assigned a number: 1-3 is a grounder hit to a pitcher (1) who threw to first (3). F9 is a long fly to right field. K is a strikeout (more on that later).

Of course, you could simply consult the stadium scoreboard for all this. But where’s the fun in that?

My dad taught me how to keep score at a Phillies game when I was about 12. He’d been scoring my younger brother’s Little League games for years, and I assume he bought me a scorecard mostly to keep me occupied. (I usually had my nose in a fantasy paperback during my brother’s games, but we both knew that was a bit weird even for the upper decks of the Vet.)

I’m not sure exactly why I took to it. Maybe I felt guilty about dragging my dad around the stadium for snacks every few innings instead of taking in the game; maybe my restless mind enjoyed the forced organization of the scorecard grid.

Whatever it was, I was hooked, and at every Major League game I’ve been to since, I’ve beelined to the scorecard kiosk the minute I get through the turnstiles at the ballpark.

The Phillies sell a lovely scorecard — printed on sturdy cardstock, complete with a beginner’s guide to keeping score that I consulted less and less as I got more comfortable with my 6-4-3s. (That’s a double play — the shortstop, 6, throws to the second baseman, 4, who throws to the first baseman, 3. You’ll get the hang of it.)

Other teams, frankly, need to step up their game. The summer after college, I lived two miles from the Tampa Bay Rays stadium in St. Petersburg, Fla. There, Rays scorecards were shoved, like an afterthought, in the back of the stadium program, and I spent three months filling in diamonds on glossy paper that could barely register a pencil mark.

In Los Angeles last year, I had to scour the bowels of Dodger Stadium before someone at the information desk handed me a tiny scorecard on a piece of printer paper. The 20-somethings sitting in front of me asked if I was “doing some fantasy baseball thing.”

This is part of the charm of keeping score: a deeply archaic, delightfully analog pastime that confounds our inescapably digital world. I am as glued to my phone as anyone, of course, and I’m not so pretentious that I refuse to consult the live ESPN app when I miss a play. (Before the smartphone era, I employed a notation that I picked up from an old Sports Illustrated column on scorekeeping: “WW,” for “wasn’t watching.”)

I’ve heard there are now smartphone apps for scorekeeping, which I feel defeats the entire purpose: to take in a game the way baseball fans have since the 1870s, when sportswriter Henry Chadwick first scrawled out a backward K. (That means a strikeout looking, and the “K” stands for “struck” — when Henry came up with the scoring system, he had already assigned an “S” to “sacrifice.”)

Keeping score means you watch — really watch — the whole nine innings. It means that sometimes you look at your book mid-game and realize that that rookie who’s 0 for 3 at the plate is actually having a great run of it in the field. It means that everyone you go to the game with has to bring you drinks and snacks because you are engaged in important baseball business and cannot possibly leave your seat. It means that, at the end of every season, you have a whole library of memories from what others might write off as forgettable midsummer games.

I don’t want to forget them. For me, the joy of watching baseball is as much about stretching out a perfect summer day as it is racing to Broad Street on a crisp fall night. The long, long baseball season is as much about the journey as the destination.

Or so I tell myself when I’m screaming at my television in October. When the Phils lost the NLCS last year, I wrote “I hate everything” in the notes section of my scorecard and then flipped back a few pages to bask in the warm embrace of a game in July where we hit a million home runs. It helped, a little.

In the last few years, I’ve done my best to spread the good news of the book. At least two of my friends have taken it up after years peering over my shoulder at the stadium, and last season my husband scored his first full game by himself. I think it’s one of the nicest things he’s ever done for me.

One day, God, the ticket lottery, and the Philadelphia Phillies willing, I hope to be one of the old-timers who goes viral for keeping book at a World Series game. Until then, I’ll keep score from my living room, where I write “couch” in the section on the scorecard where you’re supposed to put your seat number at the stadium.

And whatever happens this playoff season, I know I’ll have my old scorecards to remind me just what it was like. May the Phillies bring us many filled-in diamonds, and many backward Ks.