I Taught A Scorekeeping Class And Everybody Came

Several times a week, I sit myself down in front of a baseball game either in person or on television, I retrieve my book and my pen, and I keep score. I feel my brain relax, my mind soften, my attention fully focus on one thing in a world where that rarely happens. It is a grandma hobby like knitting or embroidery or sourdough, and I love it. Scoring a game is one of the great mundane joys of my life, and I will not shut up about it.

A few seasons ago, I taught my dear friend Dana Murphy to score and now we sit in our row at the baseball game, recording each out and hit in our slightly varying scripts, in the same scorebook. People stop —mostly, it is older men who used to keep score with their fathers or grandfathers— to tell us they love to see people scoring the game still, that it reminds them of their childhood, of a slower world. You can still score, we say. Everybody can score! Dana agreed to help me, so I decided that I would attempt to host a class to teach the people of Philadelphia how to score. I made a little poster for promotion, and advertised it on Instagram and Bluesky. Worst case, I figured, no one would come and my friends and I would just watch the game together at a bar.

I felt my first twinges of hesitancy when I tried to explain the event to Julia Golda Harris, one of the owners of Val’s Lesbian Bar in Philadelphia, on the phone. Julia was open to my event, but … she didn’t understand what it was. On the phone I tried to explain that it’s like a worksheet you fill out while watching a game. I wandered off in my pitch, talking about the history of scoring, and the first woman to be a professional scorer, and how the written record is all we have of those games from baseball’s early days. Julia still did not really understand what I was talking about, which was fair, but she agreed to host anyway. As long as I thought I could get 15 people to come.