A Pleasant Blast From the Past: Why a Working Scoreboard Still Matters

I had given up.

In the world of 10U travel baseball—with turf fields, premium home-and-away jerseys with names on the back, $300 composite bats, Bruce Bolt batting gloves, arm sleeves, walk-up songs, and, somehow, even sliding mitts—there was one thing I had not seen in the season’s first ten games: a working scoreboard.

Most of the fields have perfectly good scoreboards, likely paid for by taxpayers or generous local donors. But they sit dark. What is missing is someone willing to give the game his attention and serve the community by publicly keeping track of the game. So when the scoreboard lit up at my son’s game yesterday, it felt like a small miracle.

It also took me back.

I thought of playing baseball as a boy in rural Iowa in the 1980s. We did not have fancy uniforms. We could not even keep them after the season. Most kids did not have their own bats, and if they did, no one expected a new one every year.

But we usually had something better. At nearly every game, there was at least one adult—or sometimes an older kid—who took pride in handling the scoreboard and doing the job well. It was a small act of service, the kind communities once produced almost without thinking. In our town, and in the towns around us, it was more unusual to see a dark scoreboard than a lit one.

When I was 12, our small town hosted the league tournament finals. My mom and dad helped run the youth baseball league, so they were busy getting the field and concession stand ready. They stationed me, my younger brother, and a couple of our friends at a card table behind the backstop, where we kept the official paper scorebook and ran the electronic scoreboard for four championship games across the age divisions.

We kept stats. After each game, we handed out our own makeshift awards: the Coca-Cola Classic MVP for the winning team and the Nestea Iced Tea MVP for the losing team. We named them after the free drinks we got from the concession stand for helping out.

At the time, it felt like a small privilege. Looking back, I see it differently. It was also an initiation into a world where even children were given responsibilities and trusted to carry them out. The game mattered. The town mattered. Doing the job right mattered. And the weight of those expectations encouraged us to step up and meet them as best we could.

Now we have GameChanger at my son’s games, and we are told this is progress. For those unfamiliar, GameChanger is an app that lets a parent or coach keep score on a phone during the game. Instead of posting the game’s basic facts on a scoreboard for everyone at the field to see, one adult enters each pitch and play into a phone, and the rest of us follow along on our own screens. The app displays the score, count, inning, and a running stream of player statistics.

I understand the appeal. I am grateful for the moms and dads who volunteer to run it, and I know they are doing their best. But the shift to GameChanger isn’t simply a neutral change from one technology to another. It changes where the game lives.

Those essentials—the count, the outs, the inning, the score—now appear first on one person’s phone and then on everyone else’s phones. They are no longer posted above the field, where all can see them together. They are not even posted where the boys on the field can glance up and see for themselves.

A boy in right field used to be able to turn around, look up at the scoreboard, and know where things stood. Now he has to wait until the inning ends, jog in, and ask a coach for the score.

GameChanger turns the game into a stream of data—entered, refreshed, and checked on separate screens. It may be efficient. But it also gives the rest of us one more reason to look down at our phones instead of out at the field.

A scoreboard beyond the outfield fence does something different. It fixes the game in one visible place. Everyone can see the same facts at the same moment. It gathers attention instead of scattering it. It belongs to the field, and therefore to the community gathered around it.

It also depends on something older and less programmable: a person willing to tend it. A scoreboard only works because someone decides the game is worth that small act of service.

Seeing that lit scoreboard yesterday was a reminder that newer doesn’t necessarily mean better. Not every improvement is an upgrade. Sometimes what a community needs most is not another app, but one person willing to show up, pay attention, and do a small job well. Those little acts used to be everywhere in American life. Maybe they still could be.