Trying to use someone elses book

I’ve been entering some data to do stats for a friend of mine’s 10YO team. Its been a looooong time since I’ve tried to use someone else’s book at all, let alone tried to pull data out of it, and thought I’d share a couple things I noticed. A couple of things I saw were just flat out bad technique, but others were just quirky things that made it tough. And what’s neat is, I actually got a couple neat ideas ya’ll might find as interesting as I did. This is a Glover’s book.

This first one you might find difficult depending on what book you use. Marking the pitches by the number of the pitch rather than just a mark as a strike or a ball. IOW, the 1st pitch is 1, the next pitch 2, etc., and you just put them in either the strike or ball column.

I’ve been doing that for years, so when I saw that done by this SK, I thought wow, there’s a heap of data I’ll be able to get. She’d mark foul balls in the 2 strike boxes with an ‘f’, then any fouls after 2 strikes with just a mark. I have to be honest, at 1st I thought it would be a real pain to try to interpret which pitch what which because there was no number there, but after getting used to it. its actually a pretty cool way to mark foul strikes as opposed to just strikes, and I’ll prolly incorporate it myself from now on, just so I can track different kinds of strikes better.

Another really neat thing, at least from the standpoint of trying to use someone else’s book is, she marked outs with a pink pen, but everything else with pencil. Like I said, it was pretty neat for me because it made it easy to pick data out, but I honestly don’t know that I’d be able to do it myself.

Because of all the other things I mark and track, I get the feeling there’d be far too many pink things marked than there should be, and I’d never use a pen in any case. Red pencil lead maybe, but when she did make a mistake, which happens to us all, not being able to erase the pen made it really look scrubby sometimes.

Prolly the worst thing was the way she marked errors, and if you do this, ya better stop! Lets say there were runners on 1st and 2nd, and the batter reaches 1st on an E-5. She’d draw the line from home to 1st, then mark the E-5. But then she’d mark the runner going from 2nd to 3rd as advancing on an E-5, and the same for the runner going from 1st to 2nd.

Although its true that every base acquired has to be accounted for, ya gotta be careful! At least differentiate them somehow! What ended up happening was, sometimes there would be 10 errors in a game in the book, when actually there were only 4. then to make things even worse, her markings at the bottom for RHEL sometime reflected all of the E’s marked, and sometimes only the one that was the cause of the batter or runner having a play made on that got marked. It was a NIGHTMARE!

There’s a lot more, but this is getting’ really long so I’ll cut it off for now.