Bloops: Tim Kurkjian’s Box Score Streak Ends After 20 Years
Posted by Neil Paine on August 16, 2010
Some people might not find it poignant to hear a grown man wistfully describe ending a 20-year streak of clipping names & numbers out of a newspaper every day. Those people probably aren't baseball fans.
"A most absurd streak quietly ended in 2010: For the first time since 1989, I no longer clip every box score of every baseball game from the nearest newspaper and tape each one into a spiral notebook, a daily task that I've estimated, at roughly 15 minutes per day, has cost me 40 days of my truly pathetic life."
If you're a Baseball-Reference regular, I'm pretty sure you can relate to what Kurkjian did -- and, more importantly, why he did it. But even though it's a sad occasion, I do have some good news for Tim: he can now completely rely on B-R to fill the box score void in his life...
August 16th, 2010 at 10:22 am
Wow, I did this for only playoff games once the division series started in 1995 for two years. I thought it was borderline that I did it for that long. Congrats Kurkjian: True nerd. Truly great.
August 16th, 2010 at 10:27 am
Sadly, I have a similar affliction. Yet mine is related to college basketball and though it became much easier when the internet entered my life it still is a huge drain on my Saturday mornings in the winter.
August 16th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
I used to clip out the standings from the Boston Globe every day when I was like 6 and 7 years old. When my family went on vacation for a week, we had the neighbor do it for me.
August 16th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Is there a site, or somewhere here on BR, that has a one-page printable box score for each day?
Thanks,
Matt
August 16th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
that's ok, i used to keep score of every Red Sox game in 1988 i almost kept score of every game but was forced to attend my own birthday party and couldn't make all 162 plus playoffs....
August 16th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
Definitely the end of an era. What a lot of people aren't aware of is the work of creating and editing the agate pages containing boxscores, standings, etc. I spent several years working at Newsday and the New Haven Register, not doing that myself, but I tip my hat to the folks who do that work. Sadly, I wonder how many of them still have those jobs.
August 16th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
People who read papers with early deadlines often miss out on ever seeing some box scores. This is especially true in the Eastern and Central and possibly Mountain time zones. Even East Coast night games that went into extra innings, had rain delays, was televised on a network that has longer commercial breaks than local broadcasts, or just had a lot of time-consuming activity (such as multiple big innings) may not make a paper's deadlines.
It's true that sometimes they are printed the following day, but this doesn't always happen. As a home delivery subscriber of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and before that, the Washington Post, I know there were days when I'd be delivered an early edition of the paper, while other days, I'd get a late one. If I got an early Post the day after the Orioles played in Anaheim, the box score wouldn't be in my copy of the paper, and then if the next day, I got a late edition, I wouldn't see the box score, either, because it had been in that edition the previous day. Or even if I did get the same Inquirer edition two days in a row, the sports editor may have decided that the boxscore from a game between the Royals and Mariners in Seattle two nights earlier could be bumped to make room for a tiny article about, say, Penn State coach Joe Paterno's latest recruiting find.
When the Inquirer moved to a new printing plant in 1993, a happy coincidence with the one good year the Phillies had in a decade-plus period of time, a lot of games that formerly wouldn't have made it into my home-delivered edition, in all sports, were now there. The quickest result I ever saw was on Saturday morning, May 8, 1999. Curt Schilling had pitched the team to a victory in Colorado the night before. The game probably ended around midnight Philadelphia time. I needed to go somewhere at 4:45 a.m. that Saturday. My paper was just being dropped off. And there was a decent amount of coverage of the game that had ended only about five hours earlier.
Ironically, the Inquirer print edition no longer has as many late games as we got after the move in the 1990s. I suspect they are putting more of an emphasis on getting quick results onto their web site. Somedays, I read a freebie paper called the Metro that is available on commuter trains and a few other places. (There are also editions in New York and Boston in the U.S. and lots of overseas cities.) If a game by a local team ends after around 10:30, there is no coverage of it in the Metro the next day (and no catching up the day after that.) Last night's Phillies game against the Mets on ESPN, starting about an hour later than most East Coast Phillies games and featuring the longer commercial breaks that ESPN has, was not in this morning's Metro.
August 16th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
I used to clip nearly every baseball picture out of Sports Illustrated and Sporting news. I would then buy a cheap 2 feet by 3 feet frame and tape on with double sided tape. The collage of different players and plays was pretty sweet when I was younger but now what to do with 180 sq. ft. of baseball?
August 16th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
DD-
I've found that some recaps, even on sites like ESPN.com, clearly had most of the content written before the game went final and then they wrap it up when the game goes final. This is particularly evident when nothing major happens in the last few innings. You might get a lot of talk about what happened in the middle innings or how one team got ahead for good and then jump right to the final score. I guess this is the compromise made when trying to balance speed of delivery with depth of content.
It was one reason why, as a kid, I always thought the local Bergen (NJ) Record was a far superior paper to the NY Times. Because the Times had a far larger distribution area, they never had the late games. But the Record always did and to me, at 8 years old, that was all the difference. Few things aggravated me more than seeing, "NY Mets at LD Dodgers, late" in the list of scores.
I don't read papers much anymore, but even when I do, it's usually for the more analytical stuff, since I usually know the score of the game the night before anyway. Then again, I'm 25 so I don't have the same relationship with newspaper that previous generations do. Interesting to hear about those experiences.
August 17th, 2010 at 4:15 am
*grumble grumble grumble*
I've never done anything like this... but my OCD has begun deciding that I need to go to Baseballreference's box scores and save every Dodger box they have.
Why?
I don't know...
August 17th, 2010 at 4:37 am
ok, interestingly this is sort of what i do. I play computer baseball simulations and at first i painstakingly put every lineup into the system using retrosheet data. Of course (thank you programming data gods) I have a program that does for me. A girlfriend is now a little happier.
August 17th, 2010 at 5:53 am
Darryl West Says:
"ok, interestingly this is sort of what i do. I play computer baseball simulations and at first i painstakingly put every lineup into the system using retrosheet data. Of course (thank you programming data gods) I have a program that does for me. A girlfriend is now a little happier."
You have a girlfriend??? 😉
August 17th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Some of the Phillies games are on a traditionally broadcast (not cable) local channel that has a 10:00 p.m. newscast. The start of the news show is delayed until the game is over. But it's taped at its actual 10:00 time. The game in which the Phillies overcame a 9-2 deficit by scoring 4 runs in both the 8th and 9th last week was shown on that channel. It was amusing to watch the sports part of the newscast, in which a few highlights and lowlights from early in the game was shown, with the concluding announcement that the Phillies trailed 9-6 going into the 9th.