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Chris Hine of the Los Angeles Times has an article about the freaks like me who keep score at baseball games.
And the attentiveness requirement isn't the only impediment. There's always the danger of ridicule.
"People laugh at me, and they look at me really strange and they say, 'Why do you keep score? What are you going to do with that?' " said South Pasadena resident Kelly Wallace, who keeps score at approximately 30 Dodgers games a season.
I don't think I've ever been ridiculed for keeping score. At least to my face. And I was able to keep score and carry on a conversation with two people during the game. I can produce witnesses who can testify to that.
Now, keeping score at a Japanese baseball game will get you a very strange look. But then again, I'm also the gaijin who is a couple cms short of being two meters tall, so I've got that working against me. There was one kid who asked me if I was a scout. Someone should go into the Dodger Thoughts comments and find my projections of Akinori Iwamura and Kosuke Fukudome.
I like to be able to quickly find out that Dodgers are 2 for 14 with RISP during the game.
I usually see 10-20 people keeping score for at least part of the game when I go the the Sox. At Coors, it's rare to see any body keeping score.
And no, I've never been ridiculed for scoring, either.
For what it's worth, I use the gray metapost scorecard from this site:
http://swingleydev.com/baseball/scorecards.php
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