The actual passion project#
This resource is very near and dear to my heart, and I’m really excited to share it with you.
I’ll come back and dress up this page a bit later with all the delightful images and formatting we love, but I really wanted to publish this before opening day (Tomorrow!!!), and I’ve only got about 20 minutes to get the change done. I hope that people who need this before tomorrow get their hands on it.
I love baseball. A lot. I love the stats, the history, a cold beer on a hot day (or, in Seattle’s case, a very cold night), the scream of the crowd during a close play at the plate. It’s like nothing else.
My dad and I travel to a different ballpark each summer to follow God’s Chosen Team, the Colorado Rockies, to an away game. The first year we did this, we went to Dodger Stadium, where our $50 Chavez Ravine parking came with a game program and scorebook. I very clearly remember my voice jumping up an octave when I asked my dad, “Do you want to keep score?”
I’ve done it almost every game since.
Every so often, I look at scorecards I fill out and I compare them to scorecards from a hundred years ago, and they look more or less the same. There’s just this little slice of immortality to the practice.
But then comes the math. I really loved the Eephus League Halfliner (indeed, I still do, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good scorebook), but its box score didn’t have strikeouts on the hitter’s column. That bothered me enough I set out to design my own.
After three years of painstakingly drawing, re-drawing, and play testing designs, I settled on this one as “good enough” to print out in a full 81-page notebook. I used Mixam for that job, since they seemed to be the most effective at printing large spiral-bound books, but it’s just as good to swing by a Kinko’s on your way to the ballpark and print one page out from the PDF.
OK, I didn’t ask for your life story. Where can I get this scorebook?#
- The full PDF is available for download here.
- You can explore the resources including the .drawio layouts on my GitHub. Feel free to make changes with it, but not money (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0).