History Commons^™

Baseball Scorebook From Ty Cobb's 1904 Season In Anniston, Alabama, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

The baseball scorecard is one of the wonders of the sportsworld. On two small pages the basic skeleton of a baseball game, inning by inning, is laid out in some detail, and anyone going to it can reconstruct a significant portion of a game. These and other devices, such as the box score, are the essentials of baseball record keeping. A few weeks ago Robert Rivers of the Art Department at the University of Central Florida dropped one such scorecard on my desk, and when I began to explore its contents, I was amazed.