Official Scorer - History

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.