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Thinking
Inside the Box
It
is only a few inches long. It arrives in the newspaper every summer
morning and tells a story of victory and heartbreak without a single
sentence.
It is
Major League Baseball's box score. You find it in the sports
section. There's a box score for every game played the day before.
It's
a table of players and numbers that tells you which team won and
who
played well and who didn't. It tells you who struck out, hit a homer,
made an error and a lot more. It even gives you the score, inning
by
inning. You can re-create games in your head just from the numbers
in
front of you.
One summer, a friend of mine went to Peru. I saved the box scores
from every Red Sox game for him. He studied those papers for hours.
And
when we talked about the games, it was as if he had seen them on
TV with
me.
The baseball box score is more than 140 years old. It was invented
by a guy born in England who grew up playing a British game called
cricket. His name was Henry Chadwick. His family moved to the United
States when he was 12 years old. Chadwick continued playing cricket,
but
he also fell in love with a new American game that was becoming
popular
around New York City: baseball.
When he became a newspaper reporter in New York, Chadwick wrote
about local baseball games. He invented the box score to give his
readers a quick and easy way to "see" the games. (Remember:
There was no
TV then.) He wanted his readers to love baseball just as he did.
Chadwick's first box score appeared in 1859. The game was between
the Excelsiors (what a great name for a ball club!) and the Stars.
Chadwick listed all the players along with their hits and runs.
He also
listed fielding statistics such as putouts, assists and errors.
The box score is Henry Chadwick's daily gift to baseball fans. Now
sent by computers to nearly 1,500 newspapers and packed with more
statistics and baseball information than ever, the box score remains
what Chadwick intended it to be: a quick and easy way to fall in
love
with the game.
You can check out today's box scores in The Post's Sports section.
Use this glossary if you don't understand some of the abbreviations:
HITTING:
AB at-bats
R runs scored
H hits
BI runs batted in
BB base on balls (walks)
SO strikeouts
Avg season batting average
PITCHING:
IP innings pitched
H hits given up
R runs
ER earned runs
BB base on balls (walks)
SO strikeouts
NP number of pitches
MISCELLANEOUS:
E error
LOB runners left on base
SB stolen bases
CS caught stealing
GIDP grounded into a double play
DP double play
HR home run
2B double
3B triple
SF sacrifice fly
WP wild pitch
HBP hit by pitch
IBB intentional base on balls
T time the game took to play
A attendance
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