Let’s face it. Baseball fans are well-intentioned. We go to the ballpark, buy a program or bring our own scorebook, but often we simply lose steam during the course of the game. If you’re there with friends and family, there are countless interruptions which make the diligent among us pester our neighbor to find out what we missed. A trip to the concession stand or the facilities? It’s like a conspiracy to keep you from completing the task at hand.
In addition, the dogged attention to detail can actually detract from the overall enjoyment of the outing.
Deidre Silva and Jackie Koney, the brains behind It Takes More Than Balls: The Savvy Girls’ Guide to Baseball, have addressed the issue with their latest project, the Savvy Girls of Summer Scoring Journal. Part scorecard, part scrapbook, it asks the user/fan to take note of the who experience, not just what’s happening down on the field.
This isn’t your father’s (or even mother’s) traditional scorebook. In addition to the usual lines and boxes, the authors prompt the user for information like, “Where did you park?” “Do you care who wins?” and “Who are you with?”, questions that will make the game much more memorable years from now. Each game includes an amusing quote from some of the game’s memorable players (“The other teams could make trouble for us if they win,” Yogi Berra). The only thing that is missing are”placeholders” for photos.
“It was a lot of fun to do,” Deidre said in a telephone interview. “We thought that a companion guide [for the Guide]…would be useful for women. The entire last section of It Takes More Than Balls is dedicated to scoring.”
The authors both live in Seattle and follow the Mariners, but Deidre was born in Boston “during game six of the 1967 World Series. The family story goes that no one really cared that I was being born. All the men folk were down the corner at the pub and the women didn’t care because they were all watching Yazstremski. “). She also grew up in Maryland so she follows the Red Sox and Orioles; Jackie, a Detroit native, roots for the Tigers.
“We really just brainstormed,” in picking the questions, she said. “A lot of time we came up with these [questions] just out of conversation that we had had at the games.”
The book accommodates 10 games, a number they considered “manageable for a casual fan….We didn’t want it to be, ‘here’s 25 games; get to work.’ We wanted it to be enjoyable.”
The journal sells for $19.95, plus shipping and is available through the Web site, Savvygirlsofsummer.com.
The Amazon Report: It Takes More Than Balls: The Savvy Girls’ Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Baseball
is available on Amazon.com,
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