Keeping Score

As a baseball obsessed person, one of my favorite things to do is keep score during games my kid plays. I've helped coach his teams since he was 8. He's now 13 and I'm still around helping a bit. One way I contribute is keeping score, the old school way. It's funny, a few kids this year on his school team looked at my scorebook and asked "What's that?" They had no idea. They had only seen GameChanger which is the new school way of keeping score using a phone. I need a physical book on which I can see everything all at once. GameChanger is cool and a great new tool. I just prefer the tried and true way of keeping score. The only problem with the classic book is that rain will present a major challenge of maintaining a dry book. Pencil and paper hates rain, you dig. Other than that, it's a joy for me to sit on a bucket and score all aspects of the game and instantly be able to answer questions like "What's the score? What inning is it? Where are they [batter on the other team] in the lineup? What did he [batter on the other team] do last time?" I'm not always on point, occasionally I miss something, and sometimes I'm not sure whether I should score something an error or hit. But whether something is an error is a judgment call that has nothing to do with the way one keeps score. For the school baseball team, there's another dad using GameChanger and so we help each other out and in a way it provides a form of inter-rater reliability! It's a good mix of old school scorekeeping (relatively non-McDonaldized) and new school (relatively McDonaldized).