Baseball Scorecards

Christopher Swingley

Introduction

[ scorecard with pitching stats ]

scorecard with pitching stats

On this page you will find a collection of several different kinds of baseball scorecards that you can download and print. These scorecards are Copyright © 1998 - 2005 Christopher Swingley, and are offered under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution / ShareAlike License.

In general, the purpose of scoring is to make a record of a game with enough detail that an official box score can be generated. This should include all the batting, pitching and fielding statistics for all the players. A completed scorecard will also allow you to recall every single play in the game, as though you were listening to the game on the radio.

I have several different scorecards available here. I would recommend taking a look at the thumbnails for each, and perhaps downloading all of them so you can decide which you like best. All of them use the same style of at-bat box that allows you to record pitches, hits, and shows the path of runners on the bases.

[ metapost cyan scorecard ]

metapost scorecard, cyan ink

The major differences between the scorecards are what color the card is printed with, how many players and innings the card can accommodate, and what statistics are kept along the sides and at the bottom of the card.

Several of the scorecards were created with xfig, a venerable vector graphics program for the X11 interface. My most recent scorecards are built using a Metapost program, which I also used for the figures in the scoring guide. The Metapost source code is also available from this site.

If you are interested in more detailed instructions on how to score a baseball game, consult my Guide to Scoring Baseball.

Scorecards

[ metapost scorecard ]

metapost scorecard, grey ink

I've got five different sets of scorecards below. Most are available in single and double-sided (duplex) versions and in black, grey, cyan and light cyan.

My favorite is the scorecard with pitching statistics. It has room for 11 innings, 33 players and 10 pitchers (without writing in the margins). It allows you to keep track of the pitching statistics for each pitcher in the game. All the scorecards except the softball scorecard have room for batter statistics.

[ clean scorecard ]

clean scorecard, grey ink

The next set is the same as the scorecard with pitching statistics except the diamond and outfield are larger because the at-bat result codes on the right side of each box are missing. I call this the "clean" scorecard with pitching statistics. Thanks to Jol and Eric from the NatsAtBat.com blog for the suggestion.

The Metapost scorecard is similar, but it only has room for six pitchers, and doesn't allow you to keep track of their statistics.

The xfig scorecard has slightly larger margins, so only 10 innings can be scored with that card. All three of these scorecards have columns for hitting statistics, defensive plays and pitching statistics. The Metapost and pitching scorecards are also more refined than the xfig scorecard. I'm really only offering it for those who used it in the past and would like to keep using it.

I've also got a scorecard more appropriate for softball. It's in portrait format, which has room for 45 players and 9 innings. It's based on the xfig baseball scorecard. Both of these scorecards are only available in black and cyan.

Finally, if you've got Perl and TeX on your system, you should check out Pudge's projects page. He's written a great Perl front end to the pitching stats scorecard, which makes it really easy to produce a scorecard with all the game scoring and statistics filled in.

[ xfig scorecard ]

xfig scorecard, black ink

To use the scorecards, you must first print the file you download. All the scorecards are in PDF format. You'll need Adobe's Adobe Acrobat Reader (or another PDF viewer like Apple's Preview or Unix 'xpdf' to print it. Just click the link to get it. Once a single copy is printed, you can make double sided copies on a copy machine, or put the pages back into your printer so it will print the scorecard on both sides. If the margins of your printer don't allow the entire scorecard to be printed, select the "Fit to page" check-box in the printer dialog box to shrink it down so it will fix. You can also download the source code, modify the margins in the TeX files, and produce your own version of the PDF files.

For a complete account of how to score a baseball game consult my Guide to Scoring Baseball which shows how I scored an actual game using my scorecard as an example.

If you are interested in PostScript versions of the scorecards, need scorecards for other paper sizes, or want to see the source files I used to generate the scorecards, you can download the gzipped tar files that contain everything you'll need to modify the scorecards. Note that the source code is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and the files themselves are licensed under the Open Content License.


Other Projects

There are several other web sites out there that have some great baseball scoring content.

  • Slash coder Pudge has written a Perl wrapper around the Metapost code I developed that makes it really easy to generate your own, nicely formatted scorecards for the games you're scoring. It keeps track of the pitches, outs, and all the statistics that are shown on the card. Check it out at his projects page.
  • Retrosheet is focused on computerizing play-by-play accounts of major league baseball games. They've got a lot of these accounts, plus box-scores, their own scoresheets, and loads of other information.
  • Alex Reisner's Situational Scoring system. It's not traditional, but because you score the game in order rather than moving across the scorecard inning by inning, there's a lot more room on the scorecard. Somewhat based on the Project Scoresheet scorecard.

[ Page last updated 15-September-2005 ]