Elsewhere in this newspaper today I have a review of a book by The New York Times national baseball writer Ty Kepner called K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches. While the review was being edited, an editor had a query about the title: Why is it called K?
Well, I sort of explained, K is the symbol for strikeout when one's keeping score. Some people use a backwards K when the batter is called out on strikes. Having satisfied due diligence, the copy editor thanked me and got back to work. Fact checking may be a lost art around some shops, but we practice it here.
Had I been more pendantic, I might have gone on to say that the reason Henry Chadwick, the baseball writer who, in the 1860s, practically invented the box score and refined the art of keeping score, used a K instead of an S to stand for strikeout was because he was already using S as shorthand for "sacrifice." Looking at the word "strike," Chadwick decided that, next to the initial character, the k was the more distinctive feature.
While Chadwick is often considered the father of baseball scorekeeping--the keeping of a record of a particular game that might be read and understood by someone who hadn't attended the game--in reality his scorebooks are pretty frustrating. The game was very different in those days; Chadwick was more interested in recording how runners were retired than how they got on base, so it's always difficult and sometimes impossible to know how a runner reached base. Chadwick's scorebook concentrated on recording runs and outs.
That might sound scandalous to modern fans hipped to advanced sabermetrics. In the 1860s there were lots of errors, and often no clear distinction was made between a "safe hit" and an error; there were few extra-base hits and pitchers were required to collaborate with hitters. As things evolved, Chadwick became one of the leading proponents of a new measure called batting average, a hits/at bats ratio that allegedly helped contexturize the hitter's value by draining away the effects of his teammates' performance.
Chadwick was always looking for the science imbedded in the game. As such he's seen as the father of sabermetrics because he wrote stuff like:
"Many a dashing general player who carries off a great deal of éclat in prominent matches has all 'the gilt taken off the gingerbread,' as the saying is, by these matter-of-fact figures [such as batting average]. And we are frequently surprised to find that the modest but efficient worker, who has played earnestly and steadily through the season, apparently unnoticed, has come in, at the close of the race, the real victor."
That insight is still obscure to most casual baseball fans; some statistics are pretty worthless taken out of context. And it's ironic that batting average, the stat Chadwick championed, is probably the most empty of all commonly cited baseball stats. Even so, the Society for American Baseball Research awards its annual Henry Chadwick Award to historians, statisticians, analysts, or archivists who've done outstanding work in the field of sabermetrics.
Knowing as much as I do about Chadwick might be taken as a sign of a misspent youth.
When I was a kid I watched a lot of baseball. The game of the week, with Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek. My father's semi-pro games. We went to minor league parks and Chavez Ravine.
I always kept score. I had a detailed private system. It was based on the conventional system but with more detail. I not only indicated that a given batter got a single in a given at bat, I could tell you how many balls and strikes the pitcher had thrown subsequently, the approximate location of these pitches and whether the strikes were called, swinging or fouled. I even attempted to record what variety of pitch was thrown--a solid dot was a fastball, a comma was a breaking pitch and an open circle was something off-speed.
I drew little lines to suggest the direction trajectory of a base hit. A slash was a line drive, a little hump was a flare, a lighter line indicated a seeing-eye ground ball.
When I kept score at my fathers' semi-pro games I used a store-bought spiral-bound professional scorebook provided by the team; when I went to a minor league game (or a Dodger game at Chavez Ravine) I had to settle for the bare-bones scorecards provided by the parks, sometimes free but more and more often as I grew older for a few quarters. I told my dad I'd rather have a scorecard than a hot dog, and most times he bought me both.
(I was not enough of a nerd to bring my own scorebook to a game, though I designed my own, lining it out it with a ruler in a spiral notebook. I filled up dozens of these books as I invented and played my own stat-based tabletop baseball game that involved a roll of dice for each pitch and up to three more rolls to produce a result. I had pages and pages of possible results. While I never played Strat-O-Matic baseball, I obviously cribbed the idea from them.)
I don't keep score any more, which is probably for the best. Now when I go to a baseball game, I'm with people other than my dad (who tended to watch the games with the same score-keeping intensity I did, even though he didn't keep score). Now I'm usually with Karen, who (I think to entertain herself) likes to ask me detailed questions about the game that flatter my supposed acumen. Once a year I'm at Bark in the Park with three little dogs who need the infield rule explained to them. In any case, when I watch baseball now, there are are more important things in my life than the game. That's a reasonable outcome.
Still, I miss being able to focus on something as meaningless and exotic as a baseball game. I miss the deep fugue I could put myself into as I watched the spinning seams and made those calligraphic marks in little boxes, coding a secret language available only to true believers. It is a drug, this baseball; it allows the Order of the Backwards K to see signs and wonders, a three-hour movie on a marked-up page.
Play ball.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 03/31/2019