In fact, Henry Chadwick started out covering cricket before switching to baseball and becoming the father of scorekeeping in the 1860s. As Alan Schwarz writes in his wonderful history of baseball statistics, "
The Numbers Game," Chadwick "invented his own personal scoring form in the hope it would become standard." Similar to the ones we use today, Chadwick's scoring grid was nine batters deep and nine innings wide and was coded with letters for what the batter did and numbers for which fielders handled the ball.
That system evolved over time, but at least one notation remains the same as it did more than a century ago: a "K" in the scorebook means the batter struck out. Chadwick originated the "K" because he used the last letter of an out -- in this case, "struck'' -- as his way of identifying it in the book.
Scorekeeping, thus, has been around for about 150 years; and like Mark Twain, Paul McCartney or the Dodgers' pennant hopes on June 1, rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. Are we really seeing any fewer people keeping score now than we would have noticed a couple decades ago? After all, I was the only player on my team who raised a hand when our coach asked if anyone knew how to do it. Maybe we just don't notice scorekeepers because we don't look closely enough.
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