NATS RISE TO GLORY game thirty-six

(a Tim McCarver scorecard from somewhere I found online,

not the shining example of artistic beauty I would want to share

but hey, we are extremely limited with what is available

in terms of handcrafted arts on the internet)

I guess it is perhaps time for me to catch up on some baseball feelings though to be honest, I didn't have much over the weekend. I was preoccupied with a rich & full real life. But before abandoning pretending anybody cared for a few days, while daydreaming at work (where I do all my daydreaming, which is both hopeful but sad), I was thinking about old school keeping score in actual scorebook, and how I used to love doing that shit as a kid, and would take on THE IMMENSE CHALLENGE of keeping book for the All-Star game, which if you know anything about keeping a scorebook (and how limited your space is, and how ridiculous the All-Star rosters & substitutions are), you know that's stupid thinking. But I tried.
I am not sure all the complicated stat shit we have nowadays would have existed in straight "some guy keeping book" scorekeeping days, all the WHIP and WAR and other shit that seems like nonsense to me BECAUSE IT WASN'T ON A FUCKIN' BASEBALL CARD WHEN I WAS 12. Like you think back to those stats, and slugging percentage was complicated enough because you had to perform multiple functions to get there. So whoever had to actually punch calculator buttons was like, "Okay, I'll do slugging percentage for you fuckers, but only like once a week, okay?" But then pitchers wanted stats too, so somebody came up with the ERA and that pretty much killed shit for statisticians for decades. It wasn't until everybody had pocket computers that we went buckwild with the numbers and spreadsheet functions and sabermetrics and shit like that.
Still though, there is a weird ancient beauty in hand-written scorebook pages, especially if dudes were into it, and cultivated that talent over years. (Or ladies - I do not mean to assume only dudes did it, because I learned keeping book from my mom, who did that shit with such grace and accuracy in our little league that she was the go-to scorekeeper for all All-Star traveling teams for like six or seven years in a row.) I imagine somewhere some artsy-brained dork has compiled amazing scorebook pages from yesteryear. I actually am seriously contemplating buying a scorebook to keep book for imaginary games of chaos teams from deep inside my own ever-expanding heart. "Why would you do that?" the more saber-metrically inclined mind might ask, Who are you to judge what brings joy to another human being? Life is short, you should expand your positive chemical charge to the biosphere as much as possible.
Anyways, the Padres won the opener to this west coast road series, perhaps with their left pant legs pulled up, I do not know. And I bet somewhere in that sea of onlookers, some kid or some old dude or one of those weird yet unmistakably beautiful baseball obsessive ladies kept a wonderfully perfect scorebook of the game, only for themselves, that none of us will see ever.
Nats were 19-17.