The Electronic Baseball Scorebook, Explained

This is the one that converts people. On paper, you score a base hit, and two batters later the official scorer rules it an error. Now you have a decision: erase and leave a gray smear, cross it out and make the box unreadable, or leave it wrong.

In an electronic scorebook you tap the cell and change it. The at-bat total, the hit total, and the batting average all update with it. The box looks exactly as clean as it did before you were wrong.

The part of scorekeeping nobody misses is sitting in the parking lot after the game adding up columns. At-bats, hits, and totals per player. Runs per inning against the linescore. Checking whether it balances, finding out it does not, and going back through the book to find where you dropped one.

An electronic scorebook tallies at-bats and hits from the plays you already entered. You still enter runs and RBIs, because those take judgment. But the columns add themselves, and they add correctly.

Paper scorebooks are fragile in the ways that matter. They get rained on. They get left on a bleacher. They fill up and get replaced, and the old one ends up in a box that nobody opens.

Games in an electronic scorebook are stored on your account and organized by season. Five years from now you can pull up the game where your kid got his first hit, because it is still sitting there under the right date.