Inside the Cupboard
Sports have come a long way, just as everything else has.
One awesome addition to sports are the various scoring mechanisms available today. There’s MaxPreps that allows coaches, players, parents, fans and scouts to see a certain player’s stats at the touch of a button. There is Game Changer that is very popular with baseball and softball scorers. So, you say that makes everyone’s job so much easier and 75% of the time, I would agree with you. But, it’s that 25% that gets me out of sorts.
When you have inner-county games with both teams scoring the game, whether it’s a paper book or an electronic scoring, you have two individuals entering the stats. John sees a hit and Joe sees an error, a fielder’s choice, or heaven knows what else. I’ve been down this road a few times. With the season winding down, it’s time to cover a few things about scoring baseball/softball.
There’s not a week that goes by that my phone doesn’t ring, “My son/daughter had a hit, I was there, and I saw the ball go in the field and he made it to first!” When I would respond, “Yes, mam he did put the ball in play and he did reach first safely, however had the shortstop made the play, he would have been out OR had the runner on first made it to second, then it would have been a hit.”
And sometimes that was satisfactory but more often than not, I had an unhappy parent/grandparent.
I say all of that to say this, when you are reading recaps of the games, and especially if you were there, and you saw it differently, keep in mind there are a lot of games every night (I still object to Wednesday games but that’s another story).
Between softball and baseball at middle school, high school, and college level, recreational basketball and soon to be baseball and softball, there are sometimes as many as 18 games a night and sometimes there’s only six.
Either way, I am not cloned yet (you can thank the powers that be for that later) so I rely on scorekeepers and try to sift the wheat from the shaft when there is a conflict. And sometimes, that is not going to be to everyone’s liking.
For those teams for one reason or another do not keep electronic books, I have to rely on coaches or their designee. And sometimes I have stubborn ones who do not send them.
Fortunately, that is not very often but when it happens, I’ll report what I can with a hope and a promise for better the next time.
On a bad day, someone did something good and I do my best to stress that to coaches daily! And if they provide the information I need, I can prove it to them and that’s the way it is from Inside the Cupboard.