There is so much hype surrounding the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry that at times you feel like ignoring their games altogether.  However, their three-game series held over the previous weekend was unmissable.  Jacoby Ellsbury’s astonishing steal of home plate on Sunday night is already assured of a place in the top ten list of the best moments from the 2009 season and it followed an absolute cracker of a game on Saturday.

When I sat down at 21.00 on Saturday evening to watch that contest, I thought about the tendency of the two teams to conjure up drawn-out battles lasting four hours or more and questioned whether I should keep score or not.  My scorekeeping instincts won out and I grabbed a blank scoresheet, filled out the starting lineups and settled in for 4 hours 21 minutes of epic baseball. 

The scorecard

You can access a scanned copy of my completed scorecard here as a pdf.  I used the BGB ‘Innings’ Scorecard for this game, adding the batting lineup numbers on the left-hand side in a rather inelegant fashion (I might add them on to a modified version of the scorecard at some point).  Normally I use the uniform numbers as my reference, but it’s easier to use the batting lineup numbers and I went with them in this case. 

The other general scoring feature I used here that I haven’t in the past is the numbering of strikeouts and walks.  I picked this up from Joe and, as with most good ideas, it’s an obvious thing to do when you think about it.  Keeping track of the number of strikeouts and walks each pitcher accumulates as the game goes on is definitely a useful piece of info to collect.

The game

The game itself was a 16-11 runfest in which the Red Sox came back from a 6-0 deficit to get the win.  It was a gripping back-and-forth battle that made for compelling viewing, as is made clear by both sides of my scorecard.

The Yankees’ side to the scorecard

It’s immediately obvious that Josh Beckett had an off-day.  The flame-throwing righty was struggling to miss bats and the Yankees were getting on base with relative ease early on.  

It looked like Beckett’s fifth inning would be the most critical to the outcome of the game.  The Yankees had taken a 6-0 lead in the first four innings, only for the Red Sox to reduce the lead to one largely thanks to Jason Varitek’s grand slam.  Beckett subsequently had a three-up/three-down inning in the top of the fifth and the Red Sox scored three runs in the bottom of the inning to take the lead.  Red Sox manager Terry Francona sent Beckett back out for the sixth inning and he repaid that faith by walking Derek Jeter and then giving up a two-run homer to Johnny Damon, which tied the game at 8-8. 

Now, Beckett had been struggling and the commentators questioned whether he would return for the sixth inning, but his three-up/three-down fifth inning performance obviously convinced Francona to keep him going.  When looking at that fifth inning on the scorecard, it becomes clear that it came against the bottom three batters in the Yankees’ lineup (i.e. in theory the three weakest hitters).  Perhaps Francona should have been thankful that Beckett came up against those batters at that point, allowing him to log another inning, and not pushed his luck by sending him out against the top of the order again.

In any case, thankfully for the Red Sox that false dawn of an inning ultimately didn’t come back to bite them.

The most intriguing offensive performance on the Yankees’ lineup was that of Mark Teixeira.  He went 0 for 1 with a strikeout and five walks and he came around to score on each of his first three plate appearances, despite not putting the ball in play.

Teixeira was intentionally walked in the seventh inning, but in this case the number four hitter Nick Swisher wasn’t given a chance to advance him.  Johnny Damon was caught straying off second base to end the inning.  Hideki Okajima threw the ball to Dustin Pedroia to pick Damon off, although I noted it down at the time as Okajima throwing it to Nick Green (position number 6), so put that down as an error against my name.  Not only did I note the pick-off in Damon’s square, I also wrote a “Damon caught off 2nd base” comment in Swisher’s square so that I had a clear record of when it took place. 

The final scoring play to point out from the Yankee batting side is the ‘FI 2′ notation in Derek Jeter’s square in the ninth inning.  The FI stands for ‘Fielder’s Indifference’ (the 2 shows it happened during the plate appearance of the person in the number 2 spot in the batting lineup) and is used when the fielding team allows a player to steal a base near the end of a game without challenging him.  It’s also known as Defensive Indifference.

The Red Sox’s side to the scorecard

Just as you can instantly see how Beckett’s day went by looking at the scorecard, the story of A.J. Burnett’s performance is starkly revealed.  The first three innings were a breeze and then it all fell apart.  Varitek’s four-run thump, after Mike Lowell had struck out, was a massive boost for the Red Sox and Ellsbury’s lead-off homer in the fifth kept the momentum going their way. 

Several of the hurlers listed under the Yankee pitcher lineup section are far from being household names and the Red Sox tucked into Jonathan Albaladejo, Edwar Ramirez and David Robertson with relish.  Mike Lowell’s late-game heroics (six RBIs in his final two at-bats) sealed the contest for Boston, which must have been especially sweet for the third baseman considering he probably would have been traded had the Yankees not stolen in and snatched Teixeira from the Red Sox’s grasp over the offseason.

There are two scoring plays worth looking at on this side of the card.  Jacoby Ellsbury led off the eighth inning by being awarded first base due to Interference, resulting in my ‘Int’ notation and an error being assigned to Posada (the ‘2′ referring to the catcher position).  You don’t often see Interference plays in MLB, so that was a collector’s item for me.

The other play actually prompted a query here in the Comments box on last week’s You Are the Scorer feature.  It occurred in the sixth inning, there was one out and the bases were loaded for David Ortiz.  He hit a fly ball to the right fielder (position number 9) and Nick Green tagged up at third base and came home to score.  This meant that Ortiz got credited with a Sacrifice Fly and an RBI.  However, Dustin Pedroia tried to tag up from first to get to second base on the same play, where he was promptly tagged out by Jeter to end the inning. 

As Green reached home before Pedroia was put out, the run still counted.  While I knew that was the case, I was unsure at the time whether the Ortiz out/Pedroia out combination should be scored as a double play.  Joe answered the query by stating that, based on the description given, he thought it would have been a double play and he was proved correct by the official box score. 

I hadn’t written a ‘DP’ note at the time, but I added one in when I found this out.  I’m not a stickler for making sure my scorecards are completely accurate, as the 1-6 error mentioned earlier shows, but I updated this play as I’m sure it will be a useful one to refer to in the future when I forget the rule again.

A ‘long game’ doesn’t mean a ‘boring game’

It was only when Robinson Cano flied out to Jacoby Ellsbury to end the game that I realized I was tired.  Beckett threw the first pitch at 21.10 (BST) and between then and 01.31 I was oblivious to everything else going on around me, such as Saturday becoming Sunday.  As I finally got into bed and turned out the light, I couldn’t go to sleep even though I felt like I needed to.  The game was still too fresh in my mind to switch off and snooze.

The killjoys will point to some average-to-useless pitching and they would have a point to an extent.  Still, I’m happy to accept the odd game of poor pitching if it produces entertainment like this.

From the scoring point of view, there was lots of info to note down but my reward for the effort is my own completed scorecard of a game that will live long in the memory.

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