Thursday, May 10, 2018

here's one for those of you scoring at home

my dad gave me this the last time i was home
i was confused at first because he had never told me that he had been to connie mack stadium in philadelphia.  he recognized my confusion and quickly clarified that he sometimes scored games while listening to vin and jerry on the radio.  he created a scorecard and made photocopies at work (a perk in the 1960's to be sure) and away he went.

this particular scorecard is very, very cool.  it is the last regular season game that sandy koufax pitched.  on october 2, 1966, in the second game of a double header, koufax beat jim bunning and the phillies 6-3.  he struck out 10, including dick allen thrice.  koufax had some struggles in the 9th following an error, but struck out two of the final three batters he faced to complete the game.  he would, of course, retire following the world series just about six weeks after this game.

the scoring is not perfect (he failed to complete the diamond for dick schofield who scored in the second inning), and it does not match exactly with the play-by-play on baseball reference's site (bunning grounded out to koufax and not wills in the third, for example), but it is still pretty cool.  bunning's record is also incorrect in that column to the right of the positions - a column that my dad used to jot down pertinent information provided by the announcers.

the back of the paper has a listing of the dodger roster, and there is also some sort of calculation that shows this may have also been used as scratch paper at some point.  he gave me some other scorecards that were scored at various stadiums in the mid to late 1960's - candlestick, dodger stadium/chavez ravine (as the angels called it while they were using dodger stadium in their early years) - to go along with my collection of scorecards from the late '70s to early '00s.  maybe i'll share some of those in a future post.

5 comments:

  1. Very very cool. I've never thought about keeping score while listening to the radio at home. Love me a little piece of history!

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  2. Very cool that your dad kept score of this game even though he wasn't there. And the fact that it's Koufax's last regular season game makes it even more special.

    Also, I see my last name on there (pinch-hitter Gary Sutherland)


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  3. Sweet. And I just posted a scorebook entry on my blog tonight too!

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  4. This is really cool. I always like seeing scorecards around the blogs.

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  5. That was great gift to get from your dad!

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