The art of score keeping: correctly documenting the statistics of a game remains an exacting and challenging task

Baseball Digest, July, 2004 by Larry Stone

CHARLIE SCOGGINS HAS been the prima official scorer for Boston Red Sox games for 26 years, making the final call on hits and error-playing God from the press box, in the minds of ballplayer --for more than 1,300 games.

During that time he has taken more than his share of abuse, such as the time an aggrieved player threw a beer at him. Hell hath no fury like a ballplayer scored out of a base hit he feels he deserves, or charged with an error he feels he doesn't.

Jerry Remy, a retired Red Sox infielder, likes to joke to Scoggins that the scorer kept him out of the Hall of Fame by taking 1,300 hits away from him, preventing him from getting 3,000.

But in all his years with the Red Sox, the great outfielder Jim Rice never uttered one word of complaint to Scoggins. After his 16-year career ended, Rice became Boston's hitting coach. One day, he called Scoggins aside to lobby on behalf of one of his charges. Rice asked that Scoggins change an error call to a hit, an option that official scorers have for 24 hours after each game.

"OK, an problem," Scoggins replied immediately.

"Don't you want me to explain?" asked a surprised Rice.

"No, Jim. In all your years, you never asked me to change a call. You have a lot of credibility. If you say it's a hit, it's a hit."

That incident got Scoggins, a sportswriter for the Lowell Sun, to thinking: If Rice had been as strong an advocate for himself during his career--questioning maybe two calls a year--where would he be now? Maybe Cooperstown, instead of perennially disappointed when the Hall of Fame voting is announced.

"It could have been a difference between his .298 lifetime average, and a .300 lifetime average," Scoggins said. "Maybe that puts him in the Hall of Fame. He's 16 hits away from a 300 average. If I had changed one hit a year, maybe he'd have those 16 hits."

Such is the potential impact of the official scorer, a shadowy but vital figure in each major league park, earning $125 a game from major league baseball--$1 for soaring, they like to say, and $124 for the aggravation.

Baseball's vast web of record-keeping, its never-ending cycle of daffy box scores and accumulation of statistics, both arcane and essential--it all begins with the official scorer, ruling on a play, and then filling out the paperwork afterward.

While scorekeeping exists at all levels of baseball, and can he an enchanting endeavor full of both artistry and ingenuity, the insertion of the word "official" is what gives these men (and, very rarely, women) their gravitas. And their migraines.

"You're the record-keeper for the annals," said Mark Frederickson, who has scored Atlanta Braves games since 1986, "It needs to be taken with unbelievable seriousness."

The impact of the scorekeeper has been tangible throughout baseball history, since a newspaperman named Henry B. Chadwick developed and refined the current scoring system in the mid-1800s.

A player's immortality can be at stake, as with Rice, though often the player-scorer disputes bring to mind a 1970 incident, when an Oakland reserve named Frank Fernandez became so incensed over a call in Baltimore he fired his batting helmet toward the press box.

That prompted Harry Caray, then broadcasting Oakland's games, to comment, "All Fernandez is making all the fuss about is whether he bats .200 or .198 this season."

Nevertheless, the bestowal of hits and errors has a profound effect on batting averages (five hits taken away over 500 at-bats can change an average from .300 to .290) and earned-run averages (five earned runs added over 200 innings can raise an ERA from 2.25 to 2.48). It can impact All-Star selections, post-season awards, and ultimately even the Hall of Fame.

That doesn't even factor in the potential financial impact of various incentive clauses based on statistical milestones, which have elicited an occasional angry call to scorers from player agents. Don't even bring up no-hitters, which can unnerve even the most veteran of scorers as the tension mounts in the later innings.

"You always root for the first hit to be clean and that there be at let a second hit," said Bill Stetka, who served as the Baltimore Orioles' scorer for nine years before becoming the team's public relations director.

One minor league scorer knocks on wood at his press-box seat after the first hit of each game. Susan Fornoff, who stopped scoring a decade ago, said recently, "I'm sweating just talking about it. I'd get so nervous if three innings (without a hit) would go by."

Consider these pivotal moments when history and scorekeeping intersected:

* In 1953, Al Rosen lost the batting title by a point to Mickey Vernon--and the Triple Crown with it--because of a scoring call that was changed from a hit to an error the day after a mid-August game. That made the difference in Vernon's .337 average compared to Rosen's 336.

* Some historians believe Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, perhaps the most prestigious record in the sport, was aided by favorable scoring from sportswriter Dan Daniel, the primary scorekeeper at Yankee Stadium and a close friend of DiMaggio.