I have never been good at relaxation. There is a type of person who meditates, does puzzles with thousands of pieces, and holds yoga poses for hours. I envy her. I want to be a calm girl who has more than .01 ounces of chill and is capable of letting her brain enter the comfortable hum of relaxation for more than the four seconds it takes for me to remember that my phone exists. But I am not. Even though I can acknowledge that the glowing depressive brick of my iPhone prevents me from relaxing, I reach for it because I am not the kind of person who can sit still. If you sit still, your brain has too much space to create havoc, and that is dangerous.
Keeping a box score is a habit favored by old men, coaches, and also me. It is the only thing I have ever found that can occupy my mind enough to allow it to quiet for a couple of hours. At its most basic level, it is a way to keep track of what is happening in a baseball game. You write down where the ball goes, and what it does, and then you can tell what the score is and how the individual players are performing. But in practice, keeping a box score is an art. It is a way to become a participant in the action. You, as the scorekeeper, determine whether something is a hit or an error. You choose what kind of shorthand you want to use. You decide whether you color in a home run or highlight it. Inside the confines of the boxes, the game belongs to you, and only you. Even Major League Baseball’s official scorekeepers do not have a standard way to score games. The only correct way to keep a boxscore, technically, is a way that you can understand, which means it is as much an art as a method of record keeping a historical record.
As a child, my father taught me to draw my own box scores on yellow legal pads with runny blue pens; the columns were wonky, the lines bumpy, and the boxes more quadrilateral than square. For years, I tried to find a printed equivalent for this training: a book that was easy to keep score in — precisely designed, and simple enough that you could chat with your friend and drink a beer while you filled it in.
I tried, for a couple of years, the behemoth in the scorekeeping community: Bob Carpenter’s Scorebook. There were so many things to fill out. The sectioning did not make intuitive sense to me. It was workable, but I am not a broadcaster. I am but a mere regular girl trying to distract her brain by writing down what the players do into my little book! Instead of helping me to focus on the game and calm my mind, it made me frantic.
People often say that baseball is a slow game as an accusation. But what is beautiful about baseball is the space within it. Even with the addition of the pitch clock, there is time to breathe within the game: moments where a batter adjusts his gloves, or a pitcher takes a lap around the mound, or an infielder needs to tie his shoe. The pace of play is made not only for a summer day but for 162 of them. I wanted a scorebook that could replicate that.
Finally, several years ago, my friend Mike gifted me the Eephus League Halfliner scorebook. It was my goldilocks scorebook. The Eephus League Halfliner, is a book designed not only with the same space within the page as the game creates, but with the scorekeeper in mind. It is beautiful and useful and creative in its simplicity.
The Halfliner is sturdy enough to write on — with its thick pages, pens don’t bleed through when you mark a play on the little diamonds inside each box — and small enough to carry easily to the stadium. Because the scores are kept horizontally instead of vertically, the ring binding never gets in the way, and the book never flops over when writing on it. The Halfliner is also just big enough that it really requires both your hands. There’s no way to look at your phone when one of them is on the book and the other is holding a pen!
It has been crafted, from inception, by committee. Designer Bethany Heck had created a smaller scorebook (about the size of a soft moleskin) as her senior design thesis. She launched it via a Kickstarter project, and immediately began hearing back from early users. Scorers wanted a book that was larger, with room for substitutions and pinch runners and all the strange and small things that can happen in a baseball game. “It’s been reprinted twice now, and I think it’s lasted because it wasn’t just my perspective that shaped it,“ Heck tells me.
With room to score half the season (81 games), the Halfliner is perfect for sickos like me who compulsively score games they don’t even care about. But because it’s not dated in any way, a Halfliner could last a normal person years of traveling to the ballpark. I keep my finished ones on the shelf, adorned with their mustard stains, beer rings, and half-dozen different inks. There are full sections scored by friends I’ve pawned the book off onto while I’ve run to grab another round, and whole innings marked by the saddest score of all: “WW” for wasn’t watching.
What I love most about this book is that it leaves space for whatever methods a scorer has already built for themselves. “I’d say the book is very opinionated about a lot of things, but it’s not opinionated about how you score your book,” Heck says. It has the same aura of the ones I drew on paper as a child, but neater. These are the guidelines you need to make something your own, for all creativity grows best within boundaries. The Halfliner gives me the boundaries I need to put my phone down, and for three hours, to just watch a game in peace.
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