The horrors of school statkeepers

It's amazing what a wide spectrum of devotion there is to statkeeping at the high schools. We have tiny schools that have used the same statkeeper forever, and they are so professional and trustworthy and just totally have their shit together. And we have massive city and suburban schools who let a girlfriend clumsily call in stuff that you know is suspect.

In the meantime -- and I'm, thank God, out of the loop on this whole deal -- we run a scoring leaderboard that we compile for basketball that doesn't take into account the fact that a kid's average is based only on the games in which he scored, ignoring the fact that he may have played and not scored. In our HS boxes, we only run the names of the kids who scored. I've brought this up in passing a few times, and have gotten shrugs all around. It's the way we've always done it. Oh well.

 

If a player is scoring enough to make an area leaderboard, he very likely hasn't been held scoreless that often.

 

Could still have a boyfriend on the team [/cradlerobber].

 

Funny, I had a college hockey coach tell me today he'll look at the tape of road games and come with a huge difference in shot vs. what he saw and what was recorded.


Back when I was in college, the stats for the baseball team were done by the coop SID with some help from the beat writer (me).

It was a DI program-certainly not big time by any means-and the coaches would always change any goofs later, but I found it funny that all the scoring was in the hands of two hungover college kids every weekend.

 

Fun quirk of NCAA rules - there's defensive indifference in NCAA baseball but not softball.

Baseball definition: "STOLEN BASE SECTION 11. a. A stolen base shall be credited to the base runner whenever he advances a base unaided (such as by a base hit, fielder's choice, putout, error, balk, base on balls, wild pitch or passed ball). A stolen base shall be credited when a runner starts for the next base before the pitcher delivers the ball and the pitch results in what would otherwise be scored a passed ball or a wild pitch.

Exceptions — (1) Where any runner is thrown out on an attempted double or triple steal, no runner shall be credited with a stolen base. Note—On a double-steal attempt with runners on first and third bases, if there is a legitimate attempt by the fielder to retire the runner at second base and the runner is safe, that runner shall be credited with a stolen base even if the runner from third is thrown out at home on a continuous play.
(2) If a base runner is tagged out while oversliding a base, he shall not be credited with a stolen base.
(3) No stolen base shall be credited to a runner whose advance is the result of the opposing team's indifference."

Softball: "STOLEN BASE NOT CREDITED SECTION 15. a. A stolen base is not credited to a runner who advances to a base with the aid of a safe hit, putout, error, force, fielder's choice, illegal pitch, wild pitch, base on balls, hit batter, passed ball, interference or obstruction. b. A stolen base is not credited to any runner when any other runner is thrown out on an attempted double or triple steal."

I'm not quite sure why this is, but it's such a headache to remember when you're doing both sports.

 

That shit never gets old.

 

This is true, and it's the response I usually get. Still seems like there's potential for error, though.

 

I thought it would be this (audio NSFW):

 

Or this (again audio NSFW):

 

I got a couple I cover that I don't even trust them to get THAT right ...

 

The all-time worst.....

I was an SID years ago and travelling with our women's basketball team. Host team (which had lost something like 100 games in a row) has a shiny new computerized stat program that no one knows how to use. Since I'm the visiting SID, I keep quiet and polite. Well, they print out the stats at the end of the game and nothing matches up. Our leading scorer turns out to be a girl who torn her knee in preseason drills and hadn't played in a game all year, but was still on the roster.

Thankfully, I kept a book by hand and the next day went back and "Corrected" as much as I could for the season cumulative statistics.

 

It's not uncommon in college baseball for scorers to ignore catcher's indifference particularly if they have somebody or a team that steals a lot of basis and, as a result, might have numbers to put on a brag sheet.

The thought is you can interpret it that the catcher held the ball because he had no chance at throwing him out and how can you prove it otherwise? I've seen runners advance to second practically jogging and get credited with a SB. Of course, then you have programs with scorekeepers who would punch the SIDs who do this if they ever caught them...

But let me put it like this: I doubt if you'll see this happen in the SEC, Big 12, Pac-10, etc. This is a backwater thing. They know on those Tuesday nights where even the local paper is asking you to email your results to run on page 4, they won't get called out on it.