Errors vs hits, little league style

The real shame of scorekeeping improperly by accident or on purpose is that it does more harm than good! It wouldn't matter if everyone did it the same way, but they don't. the whole purpose of having rules about it and having guidelines is to try to keep everyone in the same ballpark. Unfortunately, just like the other rules of the game, everyone "thinks" they know them, but that usually isn't the case.

Just like most people know part of the rule defining a strike, they know part of a rule defining a hit or an error. Unfortunately, the parts they don't know are usually the part that applies! Shoot!, I try to keep two rule books with me every time I score a game. One is OBR and the other for the rules the game I'm scoring are being played under.

I can't think of too may games when I haven't looked at that book to be sure about something. Most times I'm right, but I'm wrong often enough to know that if I have any question, I look it up. What's it hurt to have a BA of "only" .400 when the best hitters in the ML haven been able to do that in over 50 years!

I think the problem starts when some well meaning parent keeps stats for t-ballers. Well of course some of those kids are gonna bat .800+! An ordinary play in t-ball is never to catch a ball and throw a runner out! Then it carries over into coach pitch where the whole purpose of pitchers is to let the batter hit the ball and the fielding isn't a whole lot better than t-ball.

I'd say no one should do any stats at all until the minor or 9-10 level, and even then, just the very basic stats should be kept. Until then, the kids really have no idea what a batting average is because the concept of ratios is way over most of their heads! Even at that age, they may not understand the concept, but they do understand that .300 is better than .200 and .400 is better than .300.

They may not know why, but they know it is! IMHO, until a player knows how to look at a score sheet and then compute his own BA, it really means nothing to him other than people say what a good one is compared to a bad one.

I was about 7 years old when I got Ethau Allen's All Star Baseball game. The newest players I had disks for were of the Mickey Mantle, Rocky Colavito era. I had a league made up of 8 teams and played game after game, year round. I had my own score sheets and kept them separated carefully. I kept daily standings and believe it or not, did stats for the entire league at least twice each week!

To this day I remember that 12 is a ground out, 13 a single, 10 a strike out and 1 a home run! I haven't looked at that thing in at least 25 years and still remember that Bobby Thompson's 1 was pretty darn big and slightly off center from everyone else's. Harvy Haddix was one of the best hitting pitchers which was pretty important because no one had invented the DH yet.

So, when I started playing baseball in LL, I knew what a BA was, how to compute it, how much just one hit meant and that a walk didn't count one way or the other. I can honestly say that at least half of the HS players I come across couldn't compute their own batting averaf\ge if their life depended on it and that is one crying shame!

Kids getting upset over something they have only a vague idea about how its computed is asinine! What's worse is, the parents often have no better an idea and they get even more upset! Let me tell you how hard it is to have parents keep coming up and asking if something was a hit when it was an obvious error. Then they try to shame you into changing it. For what? So they can brag to their friend how their kid went 2 for 4 instead of 1 for 4!

Naw. Youth stats don't mean much to me unless I do them or someone I know does them. Now if Ag says he has a kid batting .540 I'd believe him out of han. But even then he qualifies it by saying he's regarded as the best hitter in the league which only add to the credibility of the statement because that implies there's probably only a few other kids even close to him.

That's the kind of statement I fine plausible, 1st because I feel I can believe him based on his reputation and knowledge, but more importantly, because I know it makes sense that the best hitter in a youth league will be in that range.

Oh well! There I go again! guess I'll have to go buy one of those new composite soap boxes. I keep wearin' out the wooden ones!