We're 9 game mini-pack season ticket holders for the St. Paul Saints, the local minor league team, and usually end up buying tickets to a handful of other games as well. Tickets are cheap, the team on the field is fun to watch, the team in the stands helping put on the show is incredible, old Midway Stadium had it's charm, and the new CHS Field has been wonderful so far this year.
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The Winnipeg Goldeyes side of the card.
The engine number of the last train
to go by the stadium during
a game is written on top.
BNSF engine 6188 |
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The St. Paul Saints side of the card
from the last game at Midway Stadium.
Signed by some of the usher-tainers
and the amazing Annie Huidekoper
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It also doesn't hurt that the team this year is out of its mind having gone 56-16 with a 22.5 game lead over the second place at the time that I'm writing this. I've been to two of the losses and they were weird. You seriously expect this team to go out and win every night. The score doesn't matter; they will come back and win.
My parents taught me how to score a baseball game when I was a kid. I don't remember how old, but I'd guess in elementary school. We'd listen to Ernie Harwell call Tigers games on the radio and keep a scorecard. After I got a little older, I stopped doing it. I never kept up with it or helped out the baseball team in high school so I just fell out of the habit.
For the last couple of Saints seasons, I've gotten back in to keeping a scorecard for the game. In Midway, I would see maybe one or two others doing the same thing. I haven't seen anybody else at CHS Field keeping the score yet. Thanks to the spaciousness of Midway (read: empty bleachers) nobody ever really asked me what I was doing. We always sat near the press box and the occasional person would come up and be surprised that somebody under the age of 30 (at the time...) was scoring a game.
At CHS Field, thanks to a packed house, more people seem to notice that I'm sitting there with a clipboard scribbling things down after each pitch and it has sparked some conversation. I'll mostly hear late teens or early twenties people whispering behind me wondering what I'm doing though none of them are even brave enough to ask. Eventually they figure out it's something to do with the game, but they don't know what.
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Halsey Lindquist, PA Announcer Extraordinaire,
had his last game on Aug 8, 2015.
He signed the home side of the card with the saying
tattooed on his arm: Be Happy |
The kids that sit near me never seem too shy though, their curiosity winning out over any inhibition. A little girl at the game I was at Wednesday asked her grandpa what the clipboard was for and he told her "He's keeping the score of the game, honey". She was fascinated. She asked her grandpa how to do it and, somewhat to my surprise, he didn't know. He had the basic idea but couldn't score a game himself. So she turned to watch me and, as best as I could explain to somebody entering the first grade this fall, attempted to explain how it worked. I asked if she would help me out by letting me know if the pitch was a ball or a strike and she was more than happy to share her opinion, which usually differed wildly from that of the umpire (Side bar: She is going to grow up to be an awesome heckler some day. Or an umpire. Once
she made the call, ball or strike, there was no changing her mind no matter how much grandpa or I might have tried to convince her otherwise).
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Saints Pitcher Robert Coe took a perfect
game into the 7th and a no-hitter
into the 8th. I've never had a card
so clean so late in the game. |
At last night's game, a young woman, at most in her early teens, and her father were walking with me down the street headed to the stadium. They weren't sure exactly where to go and I offered they could follow me there. She asked why I had my clipboard and if I worked for the team (I had a jersey and hat on and was carrying a clipboard. It's amazing how you can get any where if you walk with confidence and a clipboard). I said I didn't but I always keep a scorecard as a way to pay attention and look back if I think something seems odd or unusual. Her dad explained to her that the scorecard was an art form and from the card you could perfectly recreate the game. She asked if he knew how to score it and he had to admit he didn't. Somebody showed him once but he doesn't remember.
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The Saints side of Coe's 1-hit
gem on Aug 5 2015 |
I love scoring the game. I'm sure it comes from the same place in my brain as my love of math and numbers that helped drive me in to engineering. And the scorecard is an art. Each person has their own style that they bring to it. The basic idea is always the same though and once you know how to read the card, a whole world opens up for you. Baseball, from its very beginning, will tell you all of its stories that are neatly locked away on a couple of sheets of paper. And it's not just the marks in the inning boxes. It's all the notes along the side, the personal things that stood out to you, that helped make that game special.
If you want to learn how to score a game, there are lots of great sites online. The Twins also help make it easy by posting what should go onto a scorecard on the big video board after each play and when a batter comes up. If you're ever at a Saints game with me (Section 103) or see me with my clipboard, stop on by, I'll happily teach you.
If you know how to score a game, teach a kid. Give them something that can connect them to the past of a game you love and one hopefully they will too.
