Major League Baseball

Technology aids baseball scorekeeping

Published Jul. 12, 2010 1:00 a.m. ET

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Mobile scorekeeping applications are challenging the traditional scorebooks that have long been used by local baseball coaches to log games, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

"There's no pencil-and-paper application that has stood up to a good automated application," said Scott Smith, a 17-and-under Gothams coach who uses GameChanger, one of a handful of such apps.

"People aren't doing spreadsheets on paper anymore. They're not going to be doing baseball scoring on pencil and paper, either."

Scorekeeping apps like GameChanger and iScore, the two with the most ratings in Apple's store, arrived in earnest with the iPhone, even though neither of their key developers had used a baseball scorebook before designing their products. That's partly why the apps cater to baseball neophytes.

At the same time, each game's statistics -- even advanced ones, like first-pitch strike percentage and hitters' spray charts -- are sent into sortable online databases, eradicating the need to transcribe into a spreadsheet. The apps also create live game streams so parents can follow Little League teams like they're the Yankees and Mets.

"Our mantra has been, score what you see," said Brett Law, the founder of iScore, which was acquired by ESPN last year. "If the ball's thrown to second base, just touch the second baseman. If it goes to left field, just touch left field. It's simple enough for moms and advanced enough for stat geeks."

This type of technology certainly existed, but it's only now trickling down to small colleges, high schools and youth leagues. When the founders of GameChanger bought a booth at the American Baseball Coaches Association convention in Dallas this year, their exhibition was buried in the back of a big room. By the middle of the first day, there was a line of coaches waiting to gawk.

iScore, too, saw instant success, as sales spiked almost as soon as it hit the Apple store. One of the early adopters was John Zehr, the head of ESPN's mobile division who moonlights as a recreational softball player. He experimented with iScore -- sometimes even from left field or third base -- and ultimately acquired the app.

Of 30 teams in a California high school league paid to try iScore on a trial basis this summer, all but one ditched their spiral-bound scorebooks, Zehr said.

Now, the founders expect their sales to boom with the advent of the iPad, which is similar to the scorebook in size and shape but doesn't require dog-eared pages or sharpened pencils.

Still, because of how new the products are and how stodgy purists can be, the market is fairly small. The $9.99 iScore app has been downloaded about 40,000 times, Law said, and Ted Sullivan, the co-founder of GameChanger, wouldn't be surprised if the total number of digital scorekeepers was under one percent of all coaches.

"We consider the biggest competition to be pencil and paper," said Sullivan, who has relied mostly on word-of-mouth marketing to upset that inertia.

It's not every day, after all, that the average spectator at a youth baseball game sees an iPad in a dugout.

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