I’m a baseball never was.
That’s neither here nor there and not the topic of this post though. 🙂
What I have been is a fan of the Hawai`i Rainbow baseball team for some twenty years. I missed their finest hour when they came in 2nd at the College World Series, but started following them shortly thereafter. Currently we are 4-2 on the season having taken 2 of 3 from both Santa Clara and Georgia Southern. The GS folks were nice, but they stole my seat. 😉 I don’t blame them, it’s a nice seat.
But that isn’t the topic of this post either.
The topic is, more or less, the scoring of baseball. I recently got the bug to try my hand at scoring. In all the years I’ve gone to games I’ve never done it and always been a bit mystified by the process. I gave it a try at the last game I attended (last weekend against GS) and it really improved my enjoyment of the game.
I get a bit obsessed at times and this was no different. In no time at all I’d started a search for sites on the subject. A few of the best I found are:
I’ve followed along on a tutorial and printed some score sheets for this weekend’s game between my Rainbows and the University of the Pacific. It should be fun to see if I can keep up (and figure out what I’ve done when it’s over). Even the bad job I did before learning what the heck I was doing improved my experience last week, so I expect good things.
To top it, off I went and installed MySQL on my home machine so that I could play with the stats from Baseball-Databank.org. I haven’t gotten the hang of that yet, but I did manage to pull up all the former Rainbow big leaguers in the DB. I need more practice with MySQL and my SQL. Considering I have to use it at work (a different flavor though), it’ll probably pay off in the long run.
This last bit was prompted by reading a bit of Baseball Hacks by Joseph Adler online. I’ve ordered the book as well as a book on scoring, Baseball Scorekeeping: A Practical Guide to the Rules by Andres Wirkmaa. Both are on the way!
That’s it for now…back to replaying old games in my head while waiting for a new one!
Aloha!