How to Note Substitutions on a Baseball Scorecard

Video Transcript

"We talked about what substitutions are. Now, let's look at how you denote them on the scorecard. Because you do have to keep track of them. Again, we're looking at a standard lineup card here with your batters numbers one through nine being in the game. Now we're going to go down here to Brian Moscos, who was substituted into the game. He was substituted in the top of the third inning, and he was substituted for the right fielder. Now how do I know that? Because I'm looking at the scorecard here, and we've put him in. What you do is you write the number of the inning that the batter or the substitute came into the game as, which is the third inning. Now, if he came in the top of the inning, you fill out -- you draw a triangle in the top right-hand corner, and you fill it in dark, solidly. That is the top of the inning, top of the third inning. And then here you put what position he came into the play -- 9, that's our right fielder. Now if we look down here later on in the game, we put Mike Mustafa in for the first baseman, but we put him in the bottom of the sixth inning. The way you denote that is you write the number of the inning, in this case six, and color your dark triangle in the lower left-hand corner of the scorecard, and he came in for the first baseman, who is position number four. Now another thing that you can do for this -- if Mustafa came in as a pinch hitter -- what we're going to do is we're going to write PH here, for pinch hitter. That let's us know that Mike Mustafa pinch hit for our first baseman in the bottom of the sixth inning. If we brought Moscos in as a pinch runner, we would write a P and an R right there. So that's pinch runner. When we're looking to keep score, so we can know what happened during the game, we put in Mr. Moscos in the third inning -- in the top of the third inning -- for our right fielder as a pinch runner, and Mustafa came in as a pinch hitter for our first baseman in the bottom of the sixth inning. So when you look at your scorecard you can actually get an accurate description of what happened during the game."