Clues That The Scorebook Is Cooked

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Dec 11, 2010
4,713
113
Ok so let’s have some snarky fun here. What are some clues that the scorebook is cooked? I’m not talking about games you have watched and you see e’s scored as hits but stats from teams where the coach seems to be putting stats together to dominate end of season awards etc.

I am neither a stat or a number person but it seems like there are clues that seem pretty obvious that something is fishy.

This is far from definitive but one of the things I always look at is if the teams .650 hitter has any ROE after there are enough at bats that you are starting to get meaningful number of plate appearances. I really notice this when the player is hitting a lot of singles and not as many xbh. Slappers would be an obvious exception I would think.

If you aren’t striking out and you are putting balls in play, how do you never hit into a fc or roe?
 

Ken Krause

Administrator
Admin
May 7, 2008
3,911
113
Mundelein, IL
One way you can tell is if all balls that go past the catcher are scored either passed ball or wild pitch. You also know whose parent is keeping the book - the pitcher's or the catcher's.

Also interesting is when you go to a game and count 7-10 obvious errors but it appears as 3 in the book.
 

2br02b

Trabant swing
Jul 25, 2017
303
43
No "E"'s and no "FC"'s would be the most obvious. 10 kids with a bunch of "E"'s and "FC"'s and 1 with none would be called daddy-ball.
 
Aug 10, 2016
686
63
Georgia
I've always struggled with passed balls vs wild pitches. DD catches an she has the lowest amt of PBs and SBs on her teams..

I do know that I tend to score other catchers with more PBs than DD but that's usually the case when it hits their glove and they just don't catch it. Does anyone have a good rule about WP vs PB? DD is fairly good at keeping it in her glove if it's not pitched horribly.

I also hate scoring DD when she hits into a FC or ROE.. :/
 
Jul 16, 2013
4,659
113
Pennsylvania
Interesting topic. As the dad of a high school pitcher, I can tell you that it is painful sometimes to see some of the plays she is faced with. In a matter of two games, there were six bunt attempts that would have been routine outs for her travel team. But the high school 3b refuses to charge the ball. Based on my understanding of "ordinary effort", I would be charging them all as errors. But the official scorer has marked all of them as hits.
 
Jan 26, 2015
92
8
Southeast
When coaches daughter has ERA of .319 and the other upperclassmen pitchers have 1.4 and 1.6 respectively. And you know shes not a .319 ERA pitcher.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G920A using Tapatalk
 
Feb 20, 2015
643
0
illinois
I have observed that in high school ball the last couple of years also. In our case, the players towards the top of the lineup seem to get way more "benefit of the doubt" so to speak and questionable plays always go down as a hit. Towards the bottom of the line up seem to always go the other way. My DD is slotted in the 6 spot, so down towards the bottom, so I may just be biased, but there have been several hits that the fielder had to make substantial movement to get to the ball, and the ball tips off the edge off the glove. I would personally score that as a hit, but it always goes down as error on the fielder. I have even seen where a weak hit that went just over the infielder and landed in front of the outfielder is but in our books as an error on the outfielder. Towards the top of our line up....that would always be a hit.
 
Feb 12, 2014
648
43
It's funny this came up today. Just yesterday, I was looking at the stats leaders for our area from last season (trying to get a gauge of where freshman DD would fall) and was thinking that every coach should have to submit ROEs and FCs along with the batting averages so we could tell who was cooking the books to make the leaderboard!

As far as PB or WP, I score pretty much anything in the dirt as a WP. That doesn't mean it couldn't or shouldn't have been blocked, but it's a WP.
 
Jun 29, 2013
589
18
I've always struggled with passed balls vs wild pitches. DD catches an she has the lowest amt of PBs and SBs on her teams..

I do know that I tend to score other catchers with more PBs than DD but that's usually the case when it hits their glove and they just don't catch it. Does anyone have a good rule about WP vs PB? DD is fairly good at keeping it in her glove if it's not pitched horribly.

I also hate scoring DD when she hits into a FC or ROE.. :/

Last fall someone clued me in to the NCAA rule on this, and reagansdaddy above correctly stated it. If it is in the dirt, it's a wild pitch. My views before were always focused on whether the cactcher could have blocked it with ordinary effort, because so many of these balls in the younger ages will be in the dirt arguably on purpose (e.g., change or drop that dives). My views are still evolving on it but now I try to apply the NCAA rule as it really is the only one that I can find that addresses the issue for softball.
 

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