MLB’s Rule Changes Bring New Quirks to the Timeless Art of Scorekeeping

The scribes of the language of baseball will need to add a few more characters to their library this year.

It’s spring training for everyone. Over the last few weeks, MLB players, managers and umpires alike have begun adjusting to a new rulebook, figuring out how to handle changes like a pitch clock and ban on infield shifts.

Well … almost everyone. There’s one more relevant group of people here. They’re not at spring training, but they’ll have to accommodate the new rules all the same, and they’re patiently waiting in their home markets with pens and notebooks in hand.

They’re MLB’s official scorers.

A scorekeeper may not have to figure out how to administer or strategize or play under the new rules. But they do have to figure out how to record what happens because of them. Forget how you engineer a strikeout with a clock ticking down. How do you write it on a scorecard?

There are two answers here. The first is that it doesn’t matter. MLB does not ask scorers to follow any standardized practices for keeping score. The only requirement is that they be able to read and easily understand their own notations. The scorer has to decide whether a given play is a hit or an error, a passed ball or a wild pitch, but they do not have to finish the night with a perfectly regulation scorecard. (Exact play-by-play data is recorded and entered by a data stringer.) This means a scorer can use whatever notations they want, not just for these new plays, but for everything. Yet the second answer is that it matters very much. To keep score is to speak the language of baseball. It can be as much an art as it is a science—a deeply individual exercise, full of personal secret codes, or something more like a communal practice, handed down through generations. How a game is written on a scorecard is a record not so much of what happened as of how it was seen, felt, experienced.

So ask official scorers how they plan to designate, say, a strikeout that occurs on a pitch clock violation, and you’ll hear that it doesn’t really matter. Except for all the ways in which it does.

The pitch clock has loomed large in spring training for everyone from the pitcher on the mound to the scorekeeper :: Matt Kartozian/USA TODAY Sports

Under the new rules, a pitcher who takes too long to deliver a pitch will be charged an automatic ball, and a hitter who takes too long to get in the box will be charged an automatic strike. This means that any plate appearance can theoretically end on such a violation. Which, in a sense, is easy to score. A strikeout is a strikeout. A walk is a walk. If one happens on a pitch clock violation, it can still be designated with K or BB, just like any other. Except … should it? There’s precedent to vary notations based on just what happens. A strikeout looking can get a backward K. An intentional walk can get an IBB. If the goal is to make a scorecard as faithful an account of a game as possible, it only makes sense to include some kind of marker signifying the mechanics of a specific play. So why shouldn’t a strikeout that happens on a pitch clock violation get … er … something?

One possibility is a sideways K.

“I like that and will probably use it,” says Stew Thornley, one of the official scorers for the Twins.

That’s become an early popular choice: If you flip a K backward to signify that it was looking, not swinging, why not flip it on its side to show that it was for dallying? Some are interested in a sideways BB for a pitch-clock-violation walk, too. (Thornley likes the idea of circling a BB here instead.) But not everyone is a fan of turning the letters sideways.

“I don’t think I’m going to do that,” says Jason Lee, who scores for both the Nationals and Orioles. “That feels a little too gimmicky for me.”

Lee is considering annotating a K or BB that occurs on a violation with “PC” for “pitch clock.” Another option here would be adding an “A” for automatic. And still other possibilities will surely arise: A few scorers have yet to consider the question.

“Thanks for bringing this up. It’s something I hadn’t even thought about,” one more veteran scorer says when asked for his plans. “I need to be ready with my new notations.”

Of course, these walks and strikeouts will likely not be very common. Violations are expected to fall over the course of the season as players adjust. (In the minor leagues, infractions eventually fell to less than one for every two games, and the majority of those occurred in the middle of a plate appearance rather than on a decisive final pitch.) Thornley also scores for the Triple A St. Paul Saints, which tested out the pitch clock last year, like all minor league teams: He never scored a game where a plate appearance ended on a violation. But even if it’s rare, it’s worth having a plan for how to record it, just in case. That’s part of the beauty of keeping score: It’s a record of a game that can bring its events to mind years or decades later. Thornley has kept his card from the very first time he kept score (June 23, 1963: Orioles 4, Twins 1) and every play still resonates.

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The new rules offer an unusual look at how personal styles of scorekeeping can develop. Yes, there are basics that are (almost) universal. But there are little tricks and flourishes and notes that can make a scorecard as uniquely tied to a person as his fingerprint. This is a chance to see those quirks as they develop.

“There are some conventional practices that are done,” Lee says. “But I’ve seen dozens of different ways that people keep score, and I always find it really neat to see other people’s scorecards.”

There are other questions here: How will these violations be recorded for those who chart pitches? What about other rules that can affect the count or put a man on base, like violating the shift ban or the pickoff move limitations? MLB’s official scorers will find their answers before Opening Day. Everyone else can find theirs in their own rhythms, on their own time, with their own reasons.

“There isn't necessarily a right or wrong way to enter it. To me, it's always been about completeness, being able to be detailed enough to reconstruct an entire game play by play and maybe even pitch by pitch,” Thornley says. “People ask how it should be done. I say any way you want.”