Perfect Game / Pretty Good Youth Baseball Scoring System

I’ve had this post half-written for a few days, but it became more timely last night when Mark Buehrle pitched a perfect game for the Chicago White Sox, so it just became a “finish it up over lunch” priority. I’ve got my own little baseball-related accomplishment that I added to my site earlier this week — it seemed worth a blog post to formally announce it.

I discovered baseball relatively late in life (as in — not as a kid), and there’s been something of a perfect storm that’s made that happen:

• I had several friends who were interested in Texas Longhorn baseball, and I got hooked on going to their games when I lived in Austin
• My career evolved towards business data, and there are a lot of parallels between business metrics and baseball statistics — I’ve written on that in the past (and have a new post soon to come on the subject)
• My oldest son really, really enjoys baseball, and I’m worthless as an assistant coach due to my lack of eye-hand coordination and my lack of “coaching kids” skill; so, the best way I have to be a parent contributor is to be the team scorer…which is really what led to this post

My son’s coach for the past two seasons ia an ex-college baseball player and current IT executive, so he has a deep understanding of the game and how/why stats can help identify players’ strengths and weaknesses. In other words…he’s become something of an enabler of my enthusiasm. 🙂

Partly for fun (okay…mostly for fun), I developed a spreadsheet last season that could take my box scores for each game and generate individual and team stats. In between last season and this season, I developed a scoresheet that would integrate well with that spreadsheet. One key aspect is that the scoresheet was designed specifically for youth baseball — typically, there are more frequent defensive position changes and, up through a certain age, all players on the team bat, rather than just the nine players who are playing in the field. This is the case for both Little League and Pony baseball.

I’ve now added a permanent page on this site with the whole scoring system. It works great for me and for the age group/league in which my son plays. I’m hoping to get some other users of the system who can provide feedback to make it more robust. Check it out!