Keeping Score

by Linda Sue Park

  Jim seemed to make up his mind. He handed her the notebook and pencil, then went inside the bay doors to fetch another folding chair, which he set up next to his own.

  "Sit," he said. "Easiest way is if you watch while I do it. If you're really interested, you'll pick it up on your own, most of it anyhow, and I'll explain the rest."

  By the end of the game, Maggie knew how the defense was numbered. Not their uniform numbers, but their position numbers. Jim tore a sheet out of the back of the notebook so she could write it down to study at home.

  1 – pitcher

  2 – catcher

  3 – first base

  4 – second base

  5 – third base

  6 – shortstop

  7 – left field

  8 – center field

  9 – right field

  Jim also showed her what the numbers in the little squares meant. They told what each batter had done. "4-3" written in the square opposite the batter's name meant that a ground ball had been hit to the second baseman (4) who had thrown it to the first baseman (3) for the out.

  Jim could look at his score sheet and see exactly what had happened in any inning. Which was way better than just keeping it in your head, because when you were trying to remember what happened in a game, only the big exciting plays came to mind. But Maggie knew that baseball was often a game of little things—the pitcher falling behind in the count, the good throw to keep a runner from advancing, the slide to break up a double play—and those were hard to keep track of. Jim's score sheet didn't have every single thing written down, but the things that were there could really help you remember.

  "Can I come again tomorrow?" she asked. "Will you show me some more?"

  "Sure," Jim said. "Tomorrow's a night game. I'm off-duty, but I'll meet you here anyway. If your ma says it's okay."

  Maggie let her eyes twinkle at him. "I'll ask my dad."

  "Ha! Okay, Miss Maggie-o. And one other thing. Dodgers play tomorrow night too, but we'll be listening to the Giants' game—got it?"

  "That's all right," Maggie said. She knew the Dodgers would be on the other radio; she could find out the score whenever she wanted. Then she frowned. "But that means we'll have to have your radio turned up, won't we? So we can both hear it? The other guys—"

  "Hmm." Jim looked thoughtful. "Yeah. Well, I'll figure something out. You just worry about learning those position numbers, okay?"

  Maggie trotted home after giving Charky a hug. She already knew that she wasn't going to tell Joey-Mick about learning how to score a game, not yet. Not until she could do a whole game all by herself. Maybe she would just sit there in front of the radio, writing stuff down, and when he asked what she was doing, then she would tell him.

  She might even teach him, too. If he asked very nicely.

  Jim had brought a long extension cord to the firehouse so they could put his radio on the sidewalk a good few yards away from the drive. George expressed both astonishment and disapproval over Maggie's listening to the Giants' games, but she assured him it was only so she could learn to keep score herself, "and then I'll be doing the Dodgers' games, okay, George?" He had given his grudging approval. Not that she needed it, but she didn't want him to be mad at her.

  So much to learn about keeping score! Maggie was torn between wanting to know all of it now and the fun of discovering a new thing or two or three every day.

  Jim showed Maggie how to list the batting order, each team on a separate page. Then you wrote the inning number, one through nine, across the top, and drew lines down the page to make narrow columns for each inning. Those vertical lines and the pale blue horizontal lines printed on the page formed boxes, each no bigger than her thumbnail.

  When a player batted, you wrote the play down in the little box opposite his name, in the column for the correct inning. Special numbers and letters were used for different plays. For example, Jim taught her that "K" stood for strikeout. There were two ways for a player to strike out—by swinging and missing, or by not swinging at a pitch that was called a strike by the umpire. For a swing and a miss, you wrote a normal K. But for a called strike, you used a backward one: K.

  It was a handy way to tell the difference, but more than that, Maggie loved how the backward K looked so strange on the page—askew and confused, just like a batter befuddled by a pitch.

  "Strikeout looking is worse than strikeout swinging," Maggie declared. "At least swinging, you know the guy tried."

  "Yeah," Jim agreed, "except when the ump makes a bum call—when it shoulda been a ball."

  A strikeout was easy to record, just one letter. But for some plays, Maggie had to squeeze a lot more into the little square. Like "6-4-3" for a double play when a ground ball was hit to the shortstop, who threw to the second baseman, who threw to the first baseman.

  It was often a pure aggravation trying to make it all fit. Good thing for Maggie that penmanship was one of her best subjects in school. She discovered that it helped to have a really sharp pencil, so she bought a nickel sharpener from Mr. Aldo at the corner store and carried it around in her pocket.

  The tiny numbers and letters looked like gibberish—WP, HBP, E6—unless you knew what they meant, which made scoring like a secret language. Or maybe it was like becoming a member of a special club, one that only the most serious baseball fans could join. Maggie learned fast; after only a week, she could score almost any play on her own. Now, whenever the guys were out on a call during a game, she could tell them exactly what had happened when they got back. She could tell Joey-Mick, too. Not just the score, or the big exciting plays, but the little things as well.

  One afternoon as he was leaving the firehouse for the day, Jim asked Maggie to keep score of the Giants' game for him that evening. "I'm helping a buddy move house," he said, handing her his scorebook. "I'll probably get to hear a lot of the game, but I don't wanna miss anything. I wouldn't ask, 'cept I know that the Dodgers aren't playing tonight."

  Never had Maggie kept score so carefully. By the end of the game her shoulders ached from hunching over and her hand hurt from gripping the pencil. She double-checked everything she had written, erasing some entries and filling them in again, neater and clearer. Finally, she looked at the pages critically and nodded to herself.

  It was the tidiest score sheet she had ever done. She could hardly wait to show it to Jim.

  The next morning Maggie was at the firehouse bright and early. She had planned to look at the score-book with Jim right then and there, but as she thrust it into his hands, she felt a little flutter in her stomach and went to pet Charky instead.

  She held her breath as she heard him flip to the right pages. Would he think she had done a good job?

  "What the heck...," Jim muttered.

  Maggie swallowed hard. Slowly she lifted her head.

  "You gotta be kidding!" he said. He looked up from the score sheet, and his face lit up with a grin.

  Maggie jumped to her feet and went to stand next to him. "I was worried it would make things too crowded," she said. "I been practicing writing as small as I can."

  Not only had Maggie kept track of the plays the way he had taught her, she had added a couple touches of her own.

  At the very bottom of each square, in the tiniest letters she could manage, she had written the ball-and-strike count. "B" for a ball, "S" for a strike. A regular S for a swinging strike, a backward S for a strike looking: S .

  "The pitch count!" Jim said. "For every single batter—that's just great! How'd you come up with that?"

  Maggie felt floaty inside from his praise. "Well, I always love it when a guy gets a hit when he's got two strikes on him. I think that it's—um, it's really good batting, y'know? Good batting under pressure. So I wanted to be able to show that, but the only way to do it was to keep track of all the balls and strikes."

  "I gotcha," Jim said. "Yeah, especially if there are runners on base and two out in a close game, that makes it really exciting, and it'd be great to know th
e count."

  The second new thing was that some of the squares contained a tiny "x."

  "What are the x's?" Jim asked. "No, wait, lemme see if I can figure it out." He narrowed his eyes and stared at the sheet.

  Maggie waited, hopping up and down a little in her eagerness.

  "Hmm ... well, for a start, you've only got an x in the squares where the batter got a hit ... the x's are all outside the diamond ... only one x, never more than that. Wait, I think—"

  He raised his eyebrows at her. "It's where the hit went, right?"

  "Yep." A bigger hop—she couldn't help it. "Because sometimes a straight pull hitter goes to the opposite field—not often, but when it happens, it's interesting. And I figured ... well, it didn't happen yesterday, but there might be other times when it would be good to know."

  "Sure," Jim agreed. "I like a player who can hit to any field. They get that reputation, but it's good to have proof. That's what I like about keeping score. People talk a lot of malarkey about baseball, but when you score the games, you know what the truth is." He nodded. "You got a knack for it. When I was your age, I didn't even know how."

  Maggie looked at him curiously. "Who taught you?" She had been meaning to ask him for a while.

  Jim grinned. "My sister," he said. "See, when I was around your age, my dad tried to teach us, but I wasn't really interested. She was, even though she was younger'n me. Wasn't until high school that I finally decided I wanted to know how. My dad was gone by then, so I hadda ask her." A pause. "She taught me good. She still scores the games, too. When she can."

  "What's her name?"

  "Carol. She lives in Jersey, down the shore. Got two boys, little guys, younger than you—my nephews. I go see them once in a while."

  "That's nice."

  "Yeah. It's just her and me now. Mom passed a couple years ago."

  "Oh." Maggie thought for a minute. Parents both dead, his sister living in another state—no wonder he spent so much time at the firehouse, sometimes even on his days off. But she was glad he did.

  There was something else about keeping score—and Maggie loved this most of all. Like every other Dodger fan she knew, she felt almost like part of the team, like she herself was one of the Bums. It was as if cheering for them, supporting them, listening to the games, talking about them, somehow helped them play better.

  Maggie knew that this didn't really make any sense. It wasn't like Jackie and Campy and Pee Wee knew that her radio was turned on, or played worse if it wasn't. But there were times when it felt as though the strength of her wishes, combined with those of thousands of other fans all over Brooklyn, pulled the player or the bat or the ball in the right direction—for a stolen base or a hit or a strikeout, exactly when it was needed most.

  And for Maggie, keeping score of the game was way better than just listening. She was actually doing something. Which meant that she was helping even more than everyone else.

  THE NEW FAVORITE

  It was late July, and Friday would be Joey-Mick's twelfth birthday. Maggie knew exactly what she wanted to give him: a score sheet for one of his league games.

  Just the way she'd planned it, Joey-Mick noticed her writing during one of the Dodger games and asked what she was doing. When she showed him, he was very impressed and said he wanted to learn. His penmanship was dreadful, though, and he couldn't write the numbers and letters small enough to fit in the squares. Then he pretended he wasn't really interested. But Maggie had seen him looking in her scorebook several times after Dodgers games, and she knew he'd love to have the score of one of his own games.

  He had a game coming up on Wednesday. She could keep score, take some time on Thursday to make the score sheet look really nice, and give it to him on Friday.

  But what if he had a terrible game? What if he struck out twice and hit into a double play and made two errors in the field? His next game wouldn't be until Saturday, which meant she'd have to give him his present late—and besides, there was no guarantee he'd play well on Saturday, either.

  Before Maggie got the idea of giving him a score sheet, she had been stuck for a while wondering what she could buy him. That summer, for the first time ever, she was getting spending money.

  Dad gave her fifteen cents a week. She had to put a nickel in the church plate on Sunday, which left ten cents. A matinee movie ticket cost a quarter, but Mom almost always went to the movies too, so she paid for the tickets even after Maggie started getting an allowance.

  That meant Maggie had enough for a candy bar every week. Or ten pieces of penny candy, her usual choice, because licorice sticks and bubblegum lasted longer than a Hershey bar. She gave up candy for three whole weeks, but there still wasn't much she could buy Joey-Mick for thirty cents. Especially when what he wanted was new sneakers and a genuine Dodgers cap and, most of all, to attend a Dodgers game at Ebbets Field.

  That last wish wasn't something she could give him even if she had the money. Ebbets Field was only a couple of miles from their home, but neither Joey-Mick nor Maggie had ever been to a game there.

  It was, in their opinion, their father's single major failing. He refused to let them go to a game at Ebbets Field. The question never even came up anymore; he had made his refusal clear beyond all hope of discussion.

  Why? Well, fire was one thing. Dad had seen plenty of fires and accidents and other disasters. But fire plus a crowd: That was his real nightmare.

  A few years ago, there had been a fire at a circus in Connecticut. Dad was still at the firehouse back then, and some of the Brooklyn fire companies had gotten the call to help.

  More than 160 people in the main tent had died. The fire itself caused some of the deaths, but it was the stampeding of the panicked crowd that killed many more. People running and screaming, tripping and falling in their hurry to try to escape the flames, and then getting trampled on by the rest of the crowd. Stepped on and kicked and crushed by dozens, even hundreds of other people.... Maggie couldn't imagine it, what it would be like to die that way.

  Dad didn't have to imagine it. He had seen the bodies. Maggie knew it must have been awful beyond words, because Dad was such a talker, he loved telling stories—but he almost never talked about that day. Once when the subject came up, Maggie had seen that his eyes were blank and pained at the same time—like he was trying to pull a shade down over whatever was in his mind.

  So Joey-Mick and Maggie weren't allowed to go to any events where a big crowd would be packed into a tight space. Which meant no major league games. Not even when Joey-Mick's friend Davey offered him a free ticket to a game last year courtesy of Davey's rich banker uncle—seats just beyond the Dodgers' dugout! Joey-Mick had said no without even asking. That was how ironclad the rule was.

  Thank goodness for the radio. Some folks, like Mr. Marshall next door, could watch the games on television. Two years ago, Maggie's family along with half the neighborhood had crowded in to the Marshalls' living room to see a game on the brand-new RCA television set. Maggie had been terribly disappointed. Although the console was an enormous piece of furniture, the picture itself was only a small square, the players grainy and blurry in black and white. Nothing like the big screen at the movie theater. Maggie had gone home after only half an inning; she much preferred listening to the radio and imagining what the plays looked like.

  And now they all went to see Joey-Mick's games twice a week. Maggie wished she had gotten the score-sheet idea sooner. She could have kept score last Saturday, when Joey-Mick had hit two singles and driven in three runs and been part of two double plays in the field. That would have been the perfect game to score—why hadn't she thought of it before?

  Too bad. She would just have to score Wednesday's game and hope he did well. And if he didn't, she'd have to give him a dumb present like a Hershey bar. Which was what she had given him last year.

  On Thursday morning Maggie took her notebook and walked down to the firehouse.

  "Hey, Maggie-o! What are you doing here this time of day?
" Jim greeted her. The Dodgers' game wasn't until later that afternoon.

  "I wanted to show you something," she said. "I was hoping you might have an idea...." She held out her notebook, open to the pages where she had scored Joey-Mick's game the evening before.

  Jim took it and looked it over. "They won, eh? Good job. Looks like a pretty good game."

  "Pitchers' duel," Maggie said, "one-nothing. Nobody scored until the fifth." One of Joey-Mick's teammates had hit a double, the opposing team had made not one but two errors on the play, and the run scored. Maggie could remember without looking at the score sheet, but it was all there in the tiny box:

  "So what's the problem?" Jim asked.

  Maggie explained about the birthday present.

  "Yeah, your dad told me," Jim said. "He's gonna be twelve, right?" Then he grinned. "That's a great idea for a present. Man, I wish I had the score sheet for one of my games back when I was playing."

  Jim had already told Maggie that he had been a pitcher on his high school team. Pitcher and third base, because he had a good arm. Not good enough for professional ball, though.

  "See, there really wasn't too much going on in the game," Maggie said. "The pitchers kept getting everyone out. Including Joey-Mick."

  "Well ... did he do anything in the field?"

  Maggie brightened. "Yeah. He made one really great play. In the third inning. He had to dive to catch a liner that was headed for the hole—stretched himself all the way out, landed flat on his stomach. But he held on to the ball!"

  She grinned proudly, seeing the play in her head again. "Saved a run from scoring, too." Then she sighed. "But I don't know how to show what a good play it was. I mean, right now, it just says '4' in the box." 4, for an out made by the second baseman.

  Jim nodded. "I see what you mean. But don't worry, we'll think of something...."