Another stat / score book keeping question

Hey, Guru, I agreed with your assessment of the call. Maybe I'm not as much of a hardarse scorekeeper as I have been accused of.

 

Slapper ?

I have read somewhere that if a bunt or a slap hit results in an advancement of a baserunner that the batter is credited with a sac, if the batter swings away it is considered an at bat and in this situtation that would be a groundout with an RBI, but if I read the definition of a sac correctly for softball, it would grant a slap hit ground ball to any where in the field as a sacrifice. Please correct me if I am mis-imformed about this, I have only played baseball and am new to fastpitch. I can't say that I understand this rule and am a bit confused by it as well.

 

we would love to see....

other coaches go over the books with their keepers after a game. Sometimes honest mistakes can be made and corrected very easily if someone would just take the time to do it and make notes in the book.

We go through our book right away after every game and make sure everything is on point. Sometimes judgment comes into play and ultimately it is supposed to be the home scorebook's call, BUT if that person does not have a clue then you have to use proper judgment. I would not let a parent keep our book unless I knew that they knew the game inside and out and understood we as coaches have last say on errors, hits, earned runs, etc. I see a lot of you guys whining about parents keeping books, but I have seen a lot of "players" keeping the books for the last three years and the stats coming out in The Observer and TBR the next day are often laughable. The end of the years stats on some kids in conference that have a .450 average and never saw a hit off of at least three teams twice over in conference play puzzles me quite a bit. We would love for other HS coaches out there would help out and take the time to go through your books after the game to make sure everything is on point.

Here's a good one and true:
In a game we just recently played our coach heard the opposing team's coach make a comment in dugout after one of our kid's blasted a triple to RCF. The coach of the other team said "error?" to the other two coaches in the dugout and they said "yeah give it an error," to which our coach on first base called them on it and said to "not take the hit away from our player." They replied "oh we will call it a hit when we call it in, but for our stats we need to write in an error." WHY? My guess, their pitcher's ERA...now tell me that doesn't stink all the way around. We had more earned runs in that game than I can remember, but I will bet you they did not count even half for their pitcher while we sit here and hold our pitching staff to the highest standards...go figure.

 

In softball, you can absolutely credit a slap that advances runners as a sacrifice. The rule of thumb is, in the scorer's opinion, is the batter giving herself (or himself, in a baseball example) to move runners, or are they trying to reach base on their own? That's the tough call the scorer has to make.

With bases loaded, a batter gets an RBI for a FC groundout that scores a run (provided it's not a double play - batter never gets an RBI for a GDP), a walk, getting hit by the pitch, a sacrifice fly, interference and even by an error on the defense, if there are less than two out and the run would have scored. In general, give the batter credit for driving in a run as a result of their at-bat and their at-bat only (with the exception of interference by the defense).