My first baseball scorecard in ages, but also my first typed scorecard with format courtesy of Lou Spirito of Thirty81 Press. Besides a few examples by Lou himself and one I saw from Tom Hanks on March 29th, I may be the third person doing this?! It pulls together two spectacular pastimes and creates a lot of fun!
The lowercase “l” doubles as a 1 on many typewriter models. I underlined my “K”s to show looking.
I love that I’m not the only person who has to drive through their stationary supplies to find White Out.
I’ve got over 50 typewriters in my collection, so I’m aware of the 1 “secret” (On the Gothic typeface machines, you have to use the letter i for 1.)
Here I used some correction tape because I couldn’t be bothered with getting up to get traditional White Out or a White Out pen I’ve got somewhere. My eraser shield was also hiding in the other room as well. Incidentally, there were a few plays I wish I could have erased…
You’ll notice that some of the 0s are punched out because I should be using a backing sheet on this machine that needs its platen recovered, the last step in my restoration process for it.
I’m tempted to try using the bichrome ribbon to distinguish some data on the next go round. Might as well as use the blue/green ink to good effect. Maybe for home team versus away? Right/Left pitching and/or switch hitter batting? Alternate color to highlight changes in pitching?
I’m also tempted to use %K to indicate the caught looking idea as a % could represent broken glasses. Underlining or using a lower case k are interesting options too.
I’m tempted to look out for a 24CPI machine now so I can squish more data into a single page. Barring this, I’d be curious to hear about how one might squish more data in using a typewriter.
Fortunately none of the typewriters in the collection is as rusty as my scorekeeping is…
@chrisaldrich very cool!
Looks pretty good. Is this still a work in progress? Beta testing version?
I like scorecards with the little diamond so that scorers can trace progress around the basepaths and who’s LOB. What about stolen bases, caught stealing, wild pitches, passed balls, balks, errors? I see you have SF and FC. Any thoughts to include more options? Might need to add/modify symbols to accommodate the fixed lettering system of a typewriter. Maybe add another column with *** to indicate batters made it safely to first, second, and third, and either scored or got left standing. The side margins could be reduced a little to add that extra column. Just a few thoughts . . .
Side note . . . does /K mean K looking?
I suppose I’m beta testing for u/lou_spirito, whose project this is.
I suspect there’s no diamond as the point of the project is to fill it all in by way of typewriter. Adding a lot more would entail using much larger format to still allow it to be typewriter friendly. Design here is much more constrained than layouts for handwriting.
Yes, I’ve used /K to mean the batter left the bat on their shoulder, which comes across visually to my mind. Others distinguish using lower case k or other variations since there is no backwards K.
So far, I’ve found this to be reasonably detailed while not leaving out too much.
https://preview.redd.it/44xwbk1owyse1.jpeg?width=1206&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ef0a0db48428f6cdb2bebd83c8fe139d143eff04
I designed this sheet to be very basic, comparable to, and somewhat an extension of, the box scores found in newspaper sports sections. It’s in no way intended to be comprehensive. I make a variety of scoresheets, some include diamonds for tracking base runners (double sided letter size), down to a score sheet that fits inside an Altoids tin. All have their own purpose. The typewriter sheet was mainly created as a design challenge and never intented for public release. Surprisingly, there are folks who want it so I’m letting few people kick it around before I make it freely available.
Each scoring cell is three characters wide by two lines high. I leave it up to the scorer to develop their own shorthand. The sheet shown here uses a few things I came up with: “” represents an RBI followed by the number (so “1” for one RBI); “/“ is used to denote a pitching change; “K and KL” for strikeout swinging and looking respectively (although I prefer Hanks’ solution of “K” and “k”).
I’ll be releasing these in the coming days as they are for the most part with only modest tweaks. I’ll post the link when ready.
Thank you your comments and suggestions!