By Scott:
By definition, the official scorer is the only person at a professional baseball game other than the umpires who must be completely and utterly unbiased, according to the rules of the game.
And while it’s entirely true that I’m impartial when scoring games, too much of my time on the job is spent trying to get people to actually believe that. It’s not so much an issue with the hometown coaching staff. They don’t always agree with calls I make, but they’ve never really questioned my integrity and impartiality.
Typically, these charges come from visiting managers and coaches when I make a call they don’t like. Usually, they don’t view my decisions as something that could have gone either way, or even as an honest mistake (and I’ve certainly made my share).
Instead, most disputes involve the accusation that I’m being a “homer” — unfairly favoring the home team because I supposedly harbor some desire to make their stats more impressive.
This general suspicion isn’t necessarily unfounded given the history of the game, and it’s an attitude I’ve come to expect. Over the last century, many official scorers have developed a reputation for ruling borderline plays hits for home players to boost batting averages and errors for the visitors to protect the home pitchers’ ERAs.
Because of what could be termed overzealous “activism” by some of my colleagues and predecessors, I’m stuck with always being suspected of cooking the numbers in favor of the home side.
This leads to discussions with visiting coaching staffs that are sometimes as much about me defending my honor as they are about discussing whatever play or plays might be in question.
One such situation happened during the 2011 season, when — no joke — an opposing coach summoned me to the clubhouse to talk about the same controversial play three days in a row.
The situation was this: Late in a game, a visiting player hit a long fly ball deep toward the right field corner. The home right fielder had to run a long way to get to the ball, but in my judgment he had tracked the ball down at the warning track and positioned himself under the ball in a way that, to me, indicated that he should catch it. He didn’t, as the ball hit the heel of his glove and fell to the ground. The batter ended up at third base. I ruled a three-base error. The visiting coaches were adamant it should have been a triple, arguing that the right fielder was attempting to make a running catch and that the degree of difficulty exceeded the rulebook’s standard of “ordinary effort.”
The last of the three exasperating meetings about this matter was a 10-minute-or-so chat with an assistant coach about my motivations as a scorer. I was literally sitting in a chair attempting to convince this guy that I in no way had it out for his player by denying him a triple. I had to try to get him to believe that I didn’t care at all whether or not he got a triple, and that the most important thing was making what I felt was the right call in the moment.
It’s a tricky spot. All I could really do was give him my word, but what good is that to a skeptic who doesn’t know me?
I also had to explain to him that there was no way I could be certain that I had seen the play accurately, because I have no video replay available to me to help inform my decisions. I can only rely on what I see the one time something happens. I sit more than 300 feet away from where this play happened. The coach arguing this point was also about 300 feet away from his vantage point, but he had a different angle on the play.
Thus, I had to concede that he, in fact, could have been correct, but that there was no way to know for sure. Given that my attempts to clear things up by consulting others in the press box and the home clubhouse on their opinions of the play didn’t steer me in either direction, my original call had to stand. I told him that if I changed the call, I would only be doing it because he wanted me to, and that wasn’t an acceptable reason.
I left things by referring to a bit of wisdom I learned from the late, great Yankees and Mets official scorer Bill Shannon, who (though I don’t think he knew it) taught me pretty much everything I know about the job while I was working in New York as a statistician for STATS, Inc.
In his indispensable companion to the official rulebook, called “Official Scoring in the Big Leagues,” Shannon wrote this passage that has always stuck with me:
“If a call is made without undue influence, it is a ‘correct’ call even if it’s wrong. It’s just a mistake. … I have made some mistakes. I know for a certainty that I have never made a dishonest call.”
For me, that’s what it’s really all about. I couldn’t be sure in this case if I was right or wrong, but I wanted to make sure this coach understood that I called the play as I honestly viewed it in that moment. To his credit, he was cordial and good-spirited in all three discussions we had, and in the end he understood my perspective and appreciated that I took the time to talk about it.
Situations like this make being an official scorer a fascinating job. It probably seems ridiculous to the average person that such scrutiny could be placed on one fly ball in a single-A game, but these things are taken very seriously by the teams and players involved. If you aren’t prepared to take it equally seriously and engage with people who disagree with you, then being an official scorer isn’t for you. Not everyone is as nice about it as this guy was. Perhaps I’ll share some of those stories another day.
Want to read more about being a score keeper check out the #4 Under Appreciated Job in Baseball