British Baseball Federation

Project COBB (the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball) is an online collaboration that was founded by Joe Gray in 2008. It received recognition as a Chartered Community of the Society for American Baseball Research (better known as SABR) in 2010.

The initiative has three overarching aims: [1] to support efforts to research and publish historical details of British baseball; [2] to help make digitized copies of British baseball artefacts available online; and [3] to promote the preservation of British baseball history today, through scoring and photography.

Joe Gray acts as coordinator for Project COBB, but its success depends largely on the work of its valued collaborators, mostly members of the British baseball community.

This is the fourth in a series of four articles in which Joe outlines ways in which members of the community can help to enhance the work of Project Cobb. 

This initiative relates to Point Three of Project COBB’s three-point mission:
 “To promote the preservation of baseball history today through scoring and photography.”

Why scorer training is vital

Without trained scorers, baseball would simply not have the rich numerical record that, for many participants and followers, makes it such an appealing sport. Thanks to the growth of computer-based scorekeeping, games can now be scored without the need to learn a new language of notations.

Nevertheless, there is still the same need for scorers to understand the rules of the game and how they relate to keeping score. Furthermore, there are a variety of reasons why paper-and-pencil methods are likely to remain, among a significant proportion of scorers, the preferred means of recording a game for years to come.

The joy of keeping score

Uniquely among the world of mainstream team sports, scorers in baseball are not mere recorders of events (unfolded by the players and arbitrated over by referees or umpires). Instead , scorers can have an actual bearing on the history of the game.

As an official scorer, you are the ultimate judge of whether a hitter reaching base on a batted ball deserves a hit or if an error should be charged to a fielder. You decide if a player deserves a double, or whether they should only be credited with a single and an advance on the throw. You say whether advances on the base path are a stolen base, a passed ball or a wild pitch. You assign runs as earned or unearned. And, under certain circumstances, you will need to decide which pitcher is most deserving of getting the win.

In this way, you might have as much of a say in who wins batting titles, earned-run average awards and base-stealing crowns as the bat of the powerful slugger, the wrist-snap of the wily pitcher or the cleats of the speedster.

In addition, by being forced to focus on every pitch of the contest, scorers can gain a much greater appreciation of the subtleties of the game than people who are present just to spectate, particularly given the lack of detailed scoreboards and live game recaps in British baseball.

Other benefits and opportunities

Despite being so involved in the game, scorers get to enjoy proceedings from the comfort of a chair and with the respect of all present. And you can earn money and get travel expenses reimbursed as a result of your efforts, although just being part of the unfolding of a classic encounter is often payment enough.

For those proving themselves particularly capable of the task, there are opportunities to score in international contests and at National Baseball Championships. You can even get your name on the box score of the national final and be preserved in history — for preserving history.

Where Project COBB fits in:

One of the three overarching aims of Project COBB is to promote the preservation of British baseball history today, and scoring is one of two means of doing so that have been highlighted as being particularly important (the other is photography).

Project COBB can lend support to experienced and rookie scorers on the “ins and outs” of the rules of scoring, and can also provide assistance on the International Baseball Federation’s system of scoring notations for those individuals wishing to adopt a paper-and-pencil method.

All individuals who already score or are interested in learning how to do so should also ensure that they are registered with the Great Britain Baseball Scorers Association (GBBSA), as this group is recognised by the British Baseball Federation as its official scoring body.