Content provided in partnership with

History and adventure in a box

Sporting News, The, May 28, 2001 by Dave Kindred

On Saturday, May 18, 1912, an 18-year-old Philadelphian named William Charles Leinhauser played center field for the Tigers against the world champion A's. The young man's only major league performance gamed him two forms of immortality. First, he stood in for Ty Cobb. Second, Arthur (Bugs) Baer did a piece of fiction mentioning the game's box score.

"The fellow who got the toughest break was the semipro picked to play Ty Cobb's sPot," Baer wrote. "His monicker was too wide for the printers and it came out in the Sunday papers this way, `L'n'h's'r.' Today nobody knows whether his name was Loopenhouser or Lagenhassinger and I bet his wife still calls him a liar when he says he once played on the Detroits."

Most Popular Articles in Sports: The first family: Archie, Peyton and Eli are incredibly famous, immensely ...; The growing gap: driving distances are skyrocketing on the PGA Tour. So why ...; Which pistol caliber for self defense? Four different people come to four ...; Drag racing - National Hot Rod Association; The world's most popular .22: the Marlin Model 60 just keeps on ticking; More »

That's because Baer believed a baseball box score to be God's honest math.

Was then, still is.

The Tigers-A's box score of that May 18 game tells us about a dozen scrubs who worked in Detroit uniforms after Cobb was suspended for attacking a fan. We learn the first baseman was 41 years old, the catcher 46, the pitcher a seminary student, the game a 24-2 farce.

Eighty-nine years later, on May 18, 2001, box scores have evolved so brilliantly as troth-tellers that USA Today's little masterpieces rise to Hemingway's standard of good writing; they give us drama even as they tell "how the weather was." Cheek the last agate lines of the box from the previous day's Diamondbacks-Reds game: "Weather: 83 degrees, cloudy. Wind: 5 mph, left to right." (Hmmm, and that day the lefthanded hitting Luis Gonzalez hammered home runs No. 19 and 20.)

So let us pause to praise baseball's box scores. They are literary miniatures. They deliver biography, adventure, history. They are written in a language of their own, a code of sorts that, once mastered, certifies the

reader as a Great American.

But now comes word that the code--with its abbreviations, acronyms, symbols and numbers--has caused harrumphing and furrowing of delicate academic brows.

Writing in a recent Editor & Publisher magazine, journalism professors Charlie Tuggle and Don Sneed contend that box scores are so arcane as to be opaque. They quote Sports Illustrated writer Steve Lopez arguing that the "box score is nearly as detailed as a Melville novel."

The professors say the box score problem is most serious for readers whose native language is not English. "Chinese immigrants, whom the New York Daily News tries to attract as readers," Tuggle and Sneed write, "call baseball box scores the most mystifying thing about American culture."

Whoa. American culture has produced Tammy Faye Bakker, Richard Simmons and lizards shilling for beer. We're to believe that baseball box scores are the devil's work? But the professors sail past any such quibble to suggest that box scores also lose people who "shy away from numbers of any kind."

Whoa, again. A person who shies away from numbers is a person three months behind in mortgage payments; that person is not likely to be in step with life let `alone the enriching subtleties of wind direction during Luis Gonzalez ab's. Sorry, but that person can go fish. Numbers do matter, as authors John Thorn and Pete Palmer affirm in The Hidden Game of Baseball.

They say "statistics elevated baseball from other boys' field games of the 1840s and '50s to make it somehow `serious,' like business or the stock market." By 1863, New York newspaper reporter Henry Chadwick had transmuted cricket statistical forms into the recognizable precursor of today's baseball box scores.

And all right-thinking people are grateful, including Jacques Barzun, the French-born historian famous in ballparks for having written, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball ..." He also wrote, "And the next day in the paper: learned comment, statistical summaries, and the verbal imagery of meta-euphoric experts." All this Barzun called "so much joy."

At the same time, Barzun conceded that the language of baseball "comes easy only after philosophy has taught you to judge practice." The professors Tuggle and Sneed are on that scent as well. They don't want box scores taken out of newspapers; they just want the code explained.

For instance, in one newspaper's box score, there appears the abbreviation "RMU." The question was put to a newspaper reporter who has written baseball for 25 years: "What's `RMU'?"

"Umm," he said." `Runner ...'?"

Yes. Go on.

"Ummmm. `Runner.' Ummm. `RMU'?"

Yes.

"I don't know."

Because a runner moved up is a big deal in baseball dugouts, RMUs now are reported in some box scores, along with other seamhead esoterica such as grounded into double plays (GIDP), runners left in scoring position (RLISP) and inherited runners scoring (IRS). USA Today's boxes reveal even the nature of errors ("throw," "bobble") and which umpire threw which man out of the game (though not yet revealing the nature of the miscreant's language).

History and adventure in a box

Sporting News, The, May 28, 2001 by Dave Kindred

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Technology

Most Popular Articles in Sports

Most Popular Publications in Sports