Old Boxscores

Boxscores have changed over time.

Old Boxscores

I never thought about boxscores as a changing thing until I read that book about the history of The Sporting News.

In that book, I came across the following:

From The Sporting News: First Hundred Years, page 200

That’s right: the Associated Press and the United Press changed the format of boxscores in spring 1958.

Did you know that?

The Change

This announcement was made around February 20, 1958. There were articles about it in just about every major newspaper in the country. Here’s an example:

From Daily News (New York), February 20, 1958, page 68

Now, it was kind of a sock to the face of New York fans to mention that they could follow the up-to-the-minute information on the recently departed San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers, but we can talk about that at another time.

The Associated Press piece about this change actually contained more information that the New York tabloid left out:

From Atlantic City Press, February 20, 1958, page 17

Note here the emphasis on the elimination of individual putouts and assists, which was the reason for the controversy in The Sporting News.

An Example of an Old Style Boxscore

Now, I’m not going to be able to give you a full history of the boxscore in these pages, including all the various changes that took place over time.

However, as we continue to discuss important topics such as the nature of sabermetrics and the rise of certain baseball simulators, this stuff is going to become pretty important to understand.

Here’s a boxscore from The Sporting News for the September 26, 1930 Reds at Cubs game:

From The Sporting News, October 2, 1930, page 7

And, for the sake of comparison (and clarity), here’s the same boxscore from The Chicago Tribune:

From Chicago Daily Tribune, September 27, 1930, page 19

Here’s the same game as it appeared in The Enquirer in Cincinnati:

From The Enquirer (Cincinnati), September 27, 1930, page 12

And, just for the sake of comparison, here is the same game from The New York Times, for those who cling to the notion of a “paper of record:”

From The New York Times, September 27, 1930, page 13

Now, after looking at these four boxscores, you can see that the information is all the same. The formatting is a bit different, of course. The easiest to read is probably the boxscore in The Enquirer; the hardest to read is certainly The Sporting News, with its archaic “O” for putouts and its insistence on writing errors out at the bottom instead of putting it in a table format.

So what?

I’ve got a point to this.

I want you to look at what is missing, not what is there. Think about things that are important to the advanced study of baseball, or things that would be important to somebody hoping to model baseball in some kind of game.

The following pieces of pertinent information is not found in any of these boxscores:

• Strikeouts per batter

• Walks per batter

• Times batters hit into double plays

• Innings played for each position (though you could probably make a good guess by working backwards)

• Extra base hits given up by pitcher (you might be able to find this in the game description

I’m sure you can come up with more.

Pay attention to this, because it’s going to be important in a few days when we talk about National Pastime again.