No-Hitter History
Taking a closer look at the book...
As you can see above, my scorecard from Dylan Cease’s no-hitter in Washington has made its way out of my scorebook and into the very capable hands of the staff at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.
When I received the request, I was obviously honored and thrilled and definitely giddy in a little kid kind of way. I’m still waiting on some details about what they’re going to do with it, but the fact that it’s there and that in 35 years I could head in and find it somewhere is really pretty special. Those of you who know how I’m wired—and that’s got to be most of you who read this thing—well, you’ll get how geeked out I am over this.
I’ve received so many questions over the years about what all the little scribbles and notations on my scorecard mean, so I thought this would be a perfect moment to dive all the way in and really break down some of the granular stuff1. So…let’s re-live a bit of history…
As is clear, I am not a graphic designer, but! Hopefully this will be easy enough to follow along. I made the circles different colors to sort of more easily track what we’re talking about.
Let’s start at the top…
RED circle: Fairly straightforward. The pitching line…and what a line it is. I put the starter in ink and add relievers in pencil as the game goes on. Obviously no relievers used that afternoon. Something beautiful about seeing all those zeroes, huh? 114 total pitches, 71 strikes, if that’s not obvious at the end.
GREEN: The Padre defense that day. No changes at any point. The nine guys who started this one all finished it. Washington base coaches in black on their respective sides.
YELLOW: First strikeout of the day. Hence the “1” under the “K.” I highlight all strikeouts in yellow (it helps more easily keep track of how many there are…starting pitcher walks get pink, RBIs get blue and plays that bring home runs that are NOT RBIs (errors, wild pitches, double plays, etc., get a green highlight). Am I insane? Quite possibly. But it works for me.
DARK BLUE: The aforementioned pink highlight for a walk from the starter. The circled “8” indicates the number of pitches in the plate appearance. I’ll generally only put that down if it’s a 1 or something 7 or above.
LIGHT BLUE: Couple little cheats I put in. The circled “15” is for Juan Yepez’s 15-game hitting streak (which would obviously end that day—along with Ildemaro Vargas’s 6-gamer). The little dot on the far right indicates he hit a home run in the previous game (quick/easy way to remind the brain to say something like “and he homers for a second consecutive day,” or whatever. So two dots next to each other would be HRs each of two previous games. And if a guy has a multi-homer game, I stack the dots. So for instance, if Manny homers twice on Friday and then once more on Saturday, his Sunday dots would look like:
⚫️ ⚫️
⚫️
Again…insane. I know.
PINK: THE play from that day, right? I don’t know that “P48” is the technical way to score it, but it’s what I wrote down in the moment, haha. And what a moment. The little star after the “8” is my usual way of notating a great defensive play. The big stars on the sheet here (4th, 5th, 8th innings) were all added later in the afternoon when the no-hitter started to become a real possibility. Just those sort of “wow” ones that you know are worth mentioning afterwards.
BLACK: These are my usual notations for every starter every game: HR/RBIs, Doubles/Triples, SBs-ATT. Again, easy way to be able to peek down and say a guy has stolen his 25th base, or what have you.
ORANGE: I keep track of the score down here every game. It’s super useful to spot trends or remind myself “hey, they were down 5-0,” but of course in this game, there was only one swing that brought home runs and so there’s just one entry in the log.
Alright! I know that was a lot2. And I hope at least four of you found that interesting. If you made it all the way to the end, you definitely get a cookie. And first crack at a Q&A in the next newsletter:
Thanks as always for reading and sharing. Hope everyone enjoys the weekend…
WARNING: this is going to get really, really granular and really, really geeky. Like if you’re all “Hey, Jesse, I’m happy for you, but I’m gonna pass on this one,” I will not be offended at all lol
And now here’s another: Twitter user PadreFanDan points out that I didn’t mention how I wrote “close!” on the Ruiz grounder to Bogaerts in the 8th. And he correctly points out it deserves some background. First: I am fairly certain that’s the only time I’ve ever written that. And I did so in the moment. Like it just seemed like a big play in a big spot and I wanted to be extra-sure I noted the craziness of the play. Obviously that late in a no-hit bid every thing is a thing and so I guess I wanted to just be as on top of stuff as I could. So there ya go…