Sunday Sneak Preview III

It’s Sunday accountability time, when I give you another glimpse into my upcoming book, Diamond in the Rough: The Gospel According to Baseball. The last chapter I shared was about how baseball (and a baseball life) must be played despite all the work, intensity, drama, and disappointment involved.

This one, it naturally follows, is about numbers, math, and data. Because of course. To be serious, I don’t see how this book could be helpful if it didn’t address the mundanity toward which life seems to regress. If we don’t face the challenging, unappealing corners of the room, we can’t hope to brighten them, right? I include this chapter right away to prove that baseball can bring life and vibrance and fun to the otherwise dreariest corners of life. I also include it because it’s a little bit shorter. Some chapters in this book call for longer, drawn out looks at topics and narratives, others are quick hits, and others fall somewhere in the middle. Today’s medium-to-short chapter is about record keeping. In baseball, you play. And when you play ball, you keep score. Enjoy, and thank you for reading.

Keep score . . . of everything.

To the uninitiated, keeping score means tallying the points each team scores, and that’s very cute. But have you kept score in baseball? Have you seen an official scorecard or scorebook (a book full of scorecards)? Okay, they’re actually pretty cute too, despite their nerdy appeal. (This is going to be a rather nerdy chapter). A baseball scorecard is a grid of squares, and in each square is a little graphic representing a baseball diamond (that’s the cute part). Each row represents a spot in the batting order, and each column denotes an inning in the game, creating a log book for every event.

To keep score in baseball is to keep track of everything. The scorekeeper logs every pitch—every ball, every strike, every foul, every batted ball, every out, every hit, and the progress of every baserunner around the bases (that’s the cutest part). The scorekeeper records the trajectory of every ball in play and every fielder that touches the ball on every out. There’s a code for denoting each fielder (6-4-3, for example, indicates the ball went from the shortstop to the second baseman to the first baseman).

If you love baseball, you already know all this. It’s part of the common vernacular. And it’s really just the beginning of how detailed, thorough, and virtually omniscient baseball statistics can be. Advanced baseball statistics track more data than a 10-year-old me would have thought existed, more than 48-year-old me can really comprehend. There are more computations, analyses, and syntheses of that data into new statistics and formulae than I know what to do with. Baseball data is its own science.

This book is not going to be a primer on baseball statistics. You could create an entire volume of reference books just to do a surface-level overview of baseball by the numbers, and a deeper dive could yield a library of (and a career in) baseball data. In this chapter, my goal is simple: I want to draw attention to the fact that baseball at every level from tee ball to the Hall of Fame pays strict attention to accounting . . . and anyone who wants to live a baseball life would do well to imitate that tradition.

I would do well to imitate that tradition. I love numbers. I’m a low-key math geek. I missed one question on my math SAT, and it kills me that I didn’t get an 800. I love all statistics and especially baseball statistics. If it were up to me, I would spend weeks at a time rifling through the archives of Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference and every run-scoring or win-probability calculator I could find just so I could translate into words the stories those numbers tell. I’ll say it again: I love numbers. 

But for some reason I hate collecting and recording numbers about me. I suppose it’s more accurate to say I tend to be really insecure about the stories those numbers would tell. I would never go so far as to say numbers don’t lie (they most certainly can), but numbers by and large shine a pretty bright light on things I’d rather keep in the dark. I’m one of those people who shudders at the thought of opening an envelope that has a bill in it because I don’t want that debt to show me its ugly face. But it isn’t just money, and it’s not just money I have to pay. As a freelancer, I would always bill by the project—for a number of legitimate reasons—but the biggest and most terrifying reason was that I hate keeping track of how I spend my time. We’re talking phobia-level discomfort, here. I don’t even like compiling samples of my work or accounts of my accomplishments because a)  if I’m not proud of it, it feels like evidence that can be used to incriminate me, but also b) if I am proud of it, it feels like I’m full of myself for keeping track of it.

As it is with most insecurities, none of that makes any sense. But when we feel insecure, we’re not really interested in making sense, are we? We’re interested in feeling safe. In the game of baseball, however, safety doesn’t last very long . . . and that’s the fun of it. So why don’t we take an aggressive lead and get ready to advance to the next goal, shall we? 

Know a baseball fan who would like this? Of course you can share it, thank you for asking!

Every baseball and softball team I’ve ever been on has kept a scorebook, and some of those teams and leagues have been rough. If a beer league slow-pitch softball team can keep a scorebook (even if its main purpose is to record how much beer is consumed by each player) surely the events of your life are worth recording.

There is so much value in keeping score, and it goes far beyond knowing who wins. Keeping record of everything that happens in a baseball game helps those who play it, officiate it, watch it, write about it, and profit from it. Keeping score is knowing what happened, how it happened, and why it might happen differently in the future. Biometrical data helps keep players healthy. Advanced batting statistics tell us who’s been lucky and who’s been good. Data can remind us when our eyes and our emotional reactions conspire to gaslight us about what players have done or what they’re worth. The numbers have disabused us of the notion that taking walks is not a skill or that being able to hit better in clutch situations is. And as the data being collected and relied upon improves, the choices that baseball people make become better informed and more effective. The stronger the numbers, the wiser the choices, the better the baseball. (For the most part.)

In the baseball world, you never miss the opportunity to account for anything you can count, and you never hide the numbers . . . unless you own a baseball franchise, in which case you hide all the financial data you can.

So how does this translate to life? Let me count the ways:

1. Money. I hate budgets. I hate bank statements. I never minded investment reports, but that’s mostly because a) I didn’t have to compile them, and b) the money was always so far removed from my access that it felt more like baseball stats than actual statements. But overall, I don’t like talking about finances, bills, income, any of that. Never have. Some people would say, “grow up.” Not helpful, and not the issue. But it might work to think of budgeting and discussing money as the baseball thing to do. I like that idea—it isn’t mine, it’s a baseball concept. (I do think the reason behind discomfort around counting and measuring money has to do with a non-numeric issue I’ll discuss in the next chapter.)

1. Diet and Wellness. I tend to shun the counting of calories, the tracking of body weight, and the measurement of fat, protein, carbs, etc. But it’s such a key component of our lives, and there’s (I’m certain) so much to learn and interpret from keeping score of what we eat and what we do with our bodies. What is there to be gained by being imprecise or incognito about what we eat or how much we exercise? Like I said before, it doesn’t make sense to serve our insecurities instead of our duty as baseball people to keep score and to use the numbers to refine our approach. If I craved nutritional and biophysical data the way I crave Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, I would keep track of every calorie on its way in and (I hope) out.

1. Time. The closest I get to recording and accounting for my time is the agreement I made with my iPhone to allow it to track my phone usage. I see the report every Sunday morning, and I’m ashamed of the results. My phone says I use it enough for it to be my full-time job, one for which I am sorely underpaid. The time I spend staring at that thing is a data point I don’t want to think about. Living the baseball life requires me to crunch those numbers and to demand a change. The time I spend with my family, the time I spend working, the time I waste on things I don’t consciously prioritize . . . those numbers would tell a story if I allowed them to be tabulated. And the baseball side of my brain would love to know those numbers. It would throw an absolute fit if the absence of that data came to its attention, so I keep it distracted with Javy Báez highlights.

Those are three of what I’m sure are unlimited possibilities of real-life things anyone can record and tabulate. I could take a Bill-James plunge into every hidden depth of ignored or poorly gathered data and explore new ways to categorize and calculate toward stronger conclusions. I could start tracking other people I admire and finding the numbers that might tell their stories in a way I could learn from. I could make baseball cards of my favorite people.

That’s the thing about numbers and baseball . . . when it’s baseball, numbers aren’t boring. They’re the next best thing to watching a game! Until 25 years ago or so, the numbers—the box scores in the newspaper and the back of a guy’s baseball card—-were the only way you could relive every game or season of baseball. You could watch some games live or on TV, but you couldn’t possibly watch all of them. But you could go to the box scores and see who had a good game, who had a great game, and who went 0-4 with 4 strikeouts . . . or who pitched 1.2 innings and gave up 10 runs, only 4 of them earned. 

And when I started playing baseball as a wee lad in the instructional park league, I could open up the newspaper that got printed on a real press and delivered to my doorstep and find, sandwiched between news of presidential campaigns and stock reports and just below the catalog of MLB statistical leaders like Tony Gwynn and Robin Yount, my name with my numbers in charcoal ink and historic glory.

In baseball, everything counts and you count everything. So I guess the question for myself, the question for you is . . . does your life count? Of course it does. And since it does, maybe it’s time to start counting.

Your life isn’t less significant or less interesting than a baseball game. The details that might seem boring or underwhelming can be fascinating when you pay attention to them and make note of them. Capture them. Collect and compile the data. Allow your story to tell itself as it happens instead of judging it as unworthy.

Play ball. Keep score.