I was the manager of the Brooklyn College baseball team in the mid-late 70s. One of the responsibilities was keeping the score book. That’s tough enough to do when you don’t know the guys on the team. In a display of schadenfreude, pitchers want fielders to get errors so their earned run averages don’t go up. Batters want hit rather then errors charged to the fielders. The coach doesn’t really care, so making those tough calls can be both empowering and daunting.
Of course, the stakes go up when you get to the pros. This piece by Baseball Nation’s Rob Neyer cites yesterday’s NY Times article on Zander Hollandser’s Complete Baseball Guides and deals with more high-stakes considerations.
“The piece sent me scurrying to the bookshelf where I keep my preseason annuals. I don’t actually have many of Hollander’s books, but I do have the first baseball annual, published in 1971. The great majority of the book consists of team previews, along with notes and statistics for the key players. But there are also a couple of essays, one by Tony Kubek about broadcasting and another by Leonard Koppett about serving as official scorer. Koppett points out that teams essentially pay the players whatever the teams like — this was before free agency, of course — and so the statistics really don’t matter much; the player can cite numbers that favor him, but management will always come back with something that doesn’t. ‘Nevertheless,’ Koppett writes, ‘players don’t understand this.’
“Thus Earl Lawson, the veteran baseball writer in Cincinnati, can find himself pushed, punched, choked or threatened, at various times, by such stars as Vada Pinson, Frank Robinson and Johnny Temple. A Dick Young, in New York, can have a running battle with the whole Yankee organization for two years because he charged Mickey Mantle with an error on a ball Mantle and Roger Maris let fall between them. And every man who has ever scored can have the experience, sooner or later, of walking into the clubhouse and being loudly, rudely abused by an offended player and his teammates (who are laying the groundwork for their own future grievance, or carrying a grudge) after a decision not to their taste.
“This is not true of all players. Only about 95 per cent.”
(Back to me…)
So how, then, to score something like this?
is available on Amazon.com,
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