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| Red Barber sittin' in the catbird seat at Ebbets Field. |
When Jackie Robinson made his historic major-league debut in 1947, becoming the first African-American baseball player in the 20th century, Brooklyn Dodgers announcer Red Barber was sitting in the radio booth that day high above Ebbets Field. The Ol’ Redhead was no doubt keeping score, as were countless Dodgers fans in the stands and listening in on WHN.
In the 1940s, scorekeeping was nothing new to baseball. The practice had been around for decades, ever since Henry Chadwick pioneered the art of keeping score in 1859.
But Robinson was something new to the major leagues. Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey’s gamble to break baseball’s color barrier with a 28-year-old infielder from California was not only groundbreaking, it was history in the making.
On April 10, 1947, Rickey issued a statement that read, "The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson from the Montreal Royals. He will report immediately.”
Five days later, Barber not only wrote a black man’s name on a major-league scorecard for the first time, he completely changed his outlook on race.
Team captain Pee Wee Reese, a white shortstop from Kentucky, was one player who led the way in accepting Robinson as a teammate and as a major leaguer. “I was just trying to make the world a little bit better,” Reese said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do with your life, isn’t it?”
Inspired in part by Reese, Barber came to accept Robinson.
“Being raised in the South, when the black ballplayers came, I had to begin thinking differently,” Barber said. “I had to understand with clear eyes that I should — and must — accept him equally as I did other players.”
And so on that fateful April afternoon in Brooklyn, Red Barber penciled in the name “Robinson” on his scorecard.
Every Picture Tells A Story
Every Picture Tells A Story
Keeping score of baseball games has long been a uniquely American pastime. To do so effectively, you have to think like a hitter and keep your eye on the ball.
Over the years, keeping score has evolved into one part standard operating procedure, one part art form. So while scorekeeping guidelines are self-explanatory, they’re also open to interpretation.
“I doubt if there are any two people, fans, writers, or broadcasters, who keep score with identical symbols and systems,” Barber once said. “I do know that any fan who acquires the habit of scoring his own ballgames will find that it adds much to his enjoyment of the pastime.”
While it’s commonly accepted that “W” stands for “walk” and “K” stands for strikeout, not all scorers observe these conventions religiously.
And not even the pros in the press box can always keep their heads in the game. Longtime New York Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto, when distracted from the action on the field, would often mark his scorecard “WW” for “Wasn’t Watching.”
Rizzuto’s colorful scoring habits eventually found their way into the stands. Baseball superfan Andorra Fields, who’s been attending and scoring games across the country for more than 20 years, always knows the score.
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| Andorra Fields' scorecard from the Tigers-Red Sox game April 8, 2017. |
“If you could capture three or four hours in a photograph,” she says, “it’s right there in the scorecard.”
To remind herself of what’s transpired during a game, Fields often resorts to scribbling pictures on her scorecard. That could be a hot dog, a broken bat or a pair of stirrups.
When a couple of rowdy fans interrupted a recent Tigers-Red Sox game at Detroit’s Comerica Park, Fields drew two stick figures running on her scorecard.
During the same game, when a foul ball off the bat of Red Sox third baseman Pablo Sandoval shattered a glass partition behind home plate, Fields drew a sheet of glass on her scorecard with a hole in it.
“And if I drop any food on my scorecard,” she says, “it gets circled and labeled.”
Play-by-play announcer Pat Hughes is in his 23rd season as the radio voice of the Chicago Cubs. Last fall, when the Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians for their first World Series title since 1908, Hughes was in the Progressive Field press box keeping score during the dramatic Game 7.
After the game, Chicago’s WSCR tweeted out Hughes’ scorecard. With nearly 6,000 games scored over his long career, Hughes says his style of scorekeeping has evolved to where it’s second nature to him.
“There’s nothing scientific about it,” he says. “I use colored pens, and that’s about it.”
Hughes typically writes the Cubs lineup in blue ink, their opponents in red, and the umpires in black. “I also put things like stolen bases, wild pitches, and errors in red,” he says. “Those things stand out.”
Hughes, naturally, was very meticulous during the World Series. But he’s not always so diligent when it comes to keeping score.
“Sometimes for spring training games,” he says, “I’ll put ‘D.R.M.’ for ‘Doesn’t Really Matter’ or ‘I.F.’ for ‘I forgot!’”
The Final Frame
In all their years in Brooklyn (1884–1957), the Dodgers won just one World Series — in 1955. Robinson retired from baseball after the 1956 season, falling one game short of a second world championship.
In his penultimate game in Brooklyn, an aging Robinson, batting just .275 for the year, singled in the winning run in the bottom of the 10th inning to force a deciding Game 7 against the Yankees.
If you’re keeping score at home, that’s “1B, RBI.”
(Single, run batted in.)
(Single, run batted in.)
A version of this story first ran at Shinola.com.
