History
Henry Chadwick is generally credited with the invention of scorekeeping in baseball. Chadwick was also the inventor of the modern box score and the writer of the first rule book for the game of baseball. Since baseball statistics were initially a subject of interest to sportswriters, the role of the official scorer in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the early days of the sport was performed by newspaper writers. A judgment call that is required by the official scorer does not alter the outcome of a game, but these judgments impact the statistical records of the game. As the subjective scoring decisions which are used to calculate baseball statistics began to be used to determine the relative value of baseball players, MLB began to require approval from the league before a writer-scorer could be assigned to produce the scoring report for a game. By the 1970s, writers who were willing to score games for MLB were required to have attended 100 or more games per year in the prior three years and to be chosen by the local chapter chairman of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA). Qualified candidates for scoring were submitted to the leagues for approval.
Read more about this topic: Official Scorer
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)