How to Score Baseball#

Keeping score is the oldest way to watch a baseball game closely. With a grid, a pencil, and a handful of symbols, you record every pitch, every out, and every run as it happens — and when the last out is made, you’re holding a complete, readable history of the game. The notation is the same whether you keep score on a printed card, in a bound scorebook, or on a screen.

This guide teaches that notation from the ground up. You’ll learn how the scorecard is laid out, how the nine fielding positions are numbered, and how to record every kind of play — a routine ground out, a 6-4-3 double play, a stolen base, a pitching change, an inning that ends on a caught stealing. The early sections take a complete beginner from zero to confidently scoring a game; the later sections are a reference for the rule-heavy situations that even experienced scorers have to look up.

Why Keep Score?#

A scorecard is more than a record of who won. Keeping score changes how you watch:

• You see the whole game. Tracking every pitch and every defensive play pulls your attention to the parts of the game the scoreboard ignores — the 0-2 waste pitch, the fielder shaded the right way, the runner who took the extra base.
• You build a record. A finished scorecard tells you exactly what happened in every at-bat, inning by inning. Years later it still reads as a play-by-play of a game you were at.
• You understand the strategy. Once you’re recording substitutions, pitching changes, and the count, the manager’s decisions start to make sense — why the lefty came in, why the runner went on 3-2, why the infield played in.
• It’s a craft. Scoring has its own conventions, judgment calls, and small debates (was that a hit or an error?). Learning it well is part of the fun.

Where to Start#

If you’re new to scoring, begin with The Basics — why keep score, how the scorecard is organized, the fielder-numbering system, and the core notation. About twenty minutes of reading takes you from never having scored a game to being ready to score your first one.

If you already know the fundamentals and want the notation for a specific play, jump straight to the section you need from the sidebar — Recording At-Bats for every result type, Baserunning for steals and tag-ups, or the Quick Reference cheat sheets.

Sections#

Scoring on Paper or on a Screen#

Every concept on this site works with a pencil and a printed scorecard — that’s how the notation was designed, and that’s how most of these pages teach it. If you’d rather score on an iPad or iPhone, BaseballScorer is an app built around exactly this notation, and the Scoring on an iPad section covers its app-specific features. Either way, the symbols and conventions you’ll learn here are the same.