Durham Bulls Hit the Road

(click for larger image)

The Bulls are only on the road for four games, but you can see that they are important games. Gwinnett has been on a heck of a run in recent weeks and the old Richmond-Durham rivalry is alive and well. Too bad our parent clubs don’t play each other to make it even more fun. If Norfolk fell off for a while there, they are back in the hunt now. These four games at Gwinnett are not make or break for the Bulls, we’ll play them four more times at the end of the month. But we want to come out of this at least as good as we go in.

Gwinnett has not been as popular as other new ballpark clubs have been (averaging 5,800 per game). Not quite sure why that would be. I suppose that maybe there are some disadvantages to being so close to your parent club.

One difference, I hope, is that we’ll see a different umpiring crew. The Bulls had the same crew for 17 games starting with a 9-game stretch in early July and this 8-game stretch. I wonder if you’ve got the same crew all the time you start adjusting your pitching to the umpire?

Keeping score

I suppose a few of you who read this also keep scorecards during the game. For the last couple of days I’ve been giving the “Reisner” scorecard a try. I’m finding it a very interesting and useful way to track a game. In some ways it is an improvement over a traditional scorecard, particularly when it comes to recording what happens to players after they get on base. The scorekeeping system is apparently a variant of something called “Project Scoresheet.” I don’t know much about that at all.

What is interesting in this approach is that every time a batter comes to bat I can see (and later remember) exactly what he’s facing and what he did the last time he came to bat. It does a good job of giving me a feel for the flow of the game as well. I’ve also found it fairly useful for tracking pitchers. I don’t do pitch count, so I can’t comment on that; however, the card does seem to make that easier to do than other approaches. You can download a sample card from the link above. The instructions are reasonably clear (also on the site), although I had to go back to them after I tried the card for the first time.