thank goodness for your scorebook

Alex Reisner on February 19, 2010, 10:54 pm

That was one of the most memorable baseball games I've ever watched. Lucky you to be working it. That's exactly the kind of game where you don't want to be fumbling around with your scorecard, and you'd have to if you were using the old one-inning-per-column approach. Great story--thanks for writing.

alexeth on May 11, 2010, 07:07 pm

I didn't buy a book for probably 2 years, using printed sheets instead. I like the book very much and would buy them again rather than going back to using loose sheets (though there's always reason to have extra sheets laying around, which I use for games that don't belong in the book). I apprecaite the weight and quality. When I look at other books, whether off the shelf at Wal-Mart or sporting goods stores, or the league-provided books, I'm appalled by the lack of quality and the flimsiness. All of that in addition to the lack of real-estate and other deisgn issues that made me choose Reisner/Situational system in the first place.
Another thing I like about these is how easy I can pull out other stats. The coach looked at me after a game, and disgustedly asked "How many did we leave on base?" Now, the "11" answer was easy, but it was not much longer to glance back through the 18 situations in that game with RISP to break down in more detail what happened just by looking for little numbers on the left sides of the situation boxes. I don't want to try and remember how I did that with the old sheets.

alexeth on May 26, 2010, 05:01 pm

Here's high praise from a coach that rightly belongs to Reisner:

"BTW, your score sheet tells the best story about a game of any I have ever seen."

Alex Reisner on May 27, 2010, 06:29 pm

This also reflects your clean scorekeeping! Thanks.

alexeth on June 2, 2010, 02:08 pm

The word is spreading.
Two scorekeepers from other teams and another from one of my teams (not one I'm 'official' for) all took intent notice of the Reisner book/sheet I was using, and hopefully will look for more at the web site.
Two of them had their interest spike when a dispute arose over pitchcount. As you can see on the sample pages, I keep count as I go, with the Reisner marks recording every pitch. In a LL tournament game, our coach warned the other coach his kid had passed the absolute pitchcount. When the other keeper came over, we negotiated the pitchcount from a deviation of over 9 pitches. Having that solid documentation settled things nicely and she and another both wanted to see how I did that and may follow up at the website. People often lose pitches that are fouled off or put in play (since traditional assumes the pitch put in play but Resiner marks it too). This method really elliminates error, since there's no double-marking (the way most LL books are setup for pitchcount) so there's one less opportunity to lose a pitch. And the convention is such that pitches that are missing are more obvious.
The situation is also a help as the umpire accidentally cleared his clicker on a caught stealing at home. My book backed up the count and also documented how it got that way (aggressive kid had moved on a PB, a WP and then CS, all balls, so... easy to explain the count).
It's easy to be confident when the book has the record.

Thanks again Alex!

Alex Reisner on June 2, 2010, 04:41 pm

And thank YOU for relaying this story. I'm always glad to hear that the system is working in complex, real-game situations.

alexeth on June 17, 2010, 08:32 pm

Another story.
Championship game of tournament for 9-10 Little Leaguers. The other scorekeeper comes over talking about "you batted out of order!" Nothing special about the book, but it was simply she had missed a walk earlier in the previous inning. However, just having the nice big boxes with details of the plays made it easy to show the record. She later asked where to get the sheets.
I think the large size of the boxes is the most noticeable thing about these sheets - so much room for all the nutty things that happen in LL ball. It's an adjustment for folks to stop doing an inning per column, but the cleanness of the Reisner design sells itself after just a few tries with it. I myself used the Traditional sheets for some time before switching to Reisner, which basically sold me on the two most radical features - big boxes and pitch-counting. Swithing to situational was a logical progression made simpler by the traditional Reisner sheets.

on June 17, 2010, 08:54 pm

This year I have had a higher than normal number of games with a team batting around. This is messy using the traditional scorebooks and can lead to more mistakes. With the Reisner sheets it is of no consequnce when a team bats around.

Another benefit I experience is when the video scoreboard operator sitting next to me needs to post each batter's perfomance (e.g. "2 for 3, Last AB: Fly Out"). The guy can quickly glance at my book since all of the at bats line up, instead of being spread across different columns.