Monday, May 21, 2007 | 7:58 a.m.
Of the many pleasant memories I have of going to Wrigley Field with my old man, two of the most vivid are watching him drink Old Style beer out of a wax-lined cup and keeping score.
Remember when the announcer used to say, "If you're scoring at home, that's a passed ball?" Well, my dad didn't score at home. He wasn't that obsessed. But the ballpark, that was another story.
I'm not exactly sure why he kept score, but if I had to guess, it would be because he believed a filled-out scorecard made a much better souvenir of a ballgame than a plastic batting helmet with those little glued-in sponges that always fell out.
My dad would buy a scorecard and fill in the Cubs' batting order before the game even started. Kessinger, 6; Beckert, 4; Williams, 7; Santo 5; Banks, 3; Hickman, 9; Hundley, 2: and the name of whatever light-hitting journeyman happened to be playing center field that year, 8. Followed by the pitcher, usually Jenkins, Holtzman or Hands, 1. The numbers following the names are baseball shorthand for their positions.
My dad would fill out the lineup in pen, even before Pat Piper announced it over the public address system, and never got it wrong. Because those were the days when guys played against both right- and left-handed pitching and never got hurt, or at least would never think of sitting out a game because of a hangnail. Or a hangover.
Those days are long gone. So is, as I discovered on a recent outing to Cashman Field, the forgotten art of keeping score at a ballgame.
If you're well, one of the few still scoring at home, I counted a grand total of four people keeping a book, as we used to call it, on a Sunday afternoon. One, Jim Gemma, was the official scorer. So he doesn't count.
But as ol' Pat Piper used to say, "Have your pencils and scorecard ready" for the stories behind the other three who do.
Rob Bassett
After making a couple of laps around Cashman Field, traipsing up and down the stairs with my batting eye peeled, as if I had lost my glasses or a Dodger Dog with all the trimmings, I finally found someone who had his pencil and scorecard ready.
His name was Rob Bassett and he was wearing an authentic Atlanta Braves jersey with his name on the back and a big number "21" under it. There was scribbling on one of the numerals which, Bassett proudly said, was the autograph of none other than Las Vegas' very own Greg Maddux.
There also was some scribbling on the score sheets that Bassett's son, Nehemiah, and his Spring Valley Little League teammate Jordan Urias, were laboring over like a first-grade art project.
Actually, their scorecards looked more like doodling than a permanent record of the game. But considering Nehemiah is just 6 and Jordan only 8 and were scoring for the first time, I was impressed.
Especially because it was the third inning and neither looked bored or wanted a Sno-Kone.
Bassett, a former child actor who had a small part in the 1980s sitcom "Angie" and now moonlights as the front man for an '80s pop band, said he always has followed baseball and is a self-taught "keeper," mostly because his father was never around to show him how.
Then he broke off our conversation to explain to Nehemiah that there are many ways to record a fly-out to left field, with these running the gamut from the generic "FO" to "F-7" for a routine can o'corn to "L-7" if the ball happened to be hit on a line or a member of the Cubs' bullpen was pitching.
Bassett hopes that by teaching Nehemiah how to keep score, it will improve his knowledge of and appreciation for the game. But he said there was an even better reason for explaining the nuances of tracking runs, hits and errors to his son.
"I want to make sure he experiences all the things that I didn't get to," Bassett said.
Russ Langer
If there was a score sheet more untidy than Nehemiah Bassett's, it was the one belonging to Russ Langer, the 51's veteran play-by-play man.
Technically, Langer doesn't have to keep score. But most broadcasters do because, like the phantom double play or brushing back a guy who has tattooed your pitcher for a couple of dingers and seven or eight RBIs, it is one of the game's unwritten rules.
Besides, what better way to alert an audience that may be tuning in late to what happened three innings before?
While I have seen some sloppy scorecards, Langer's takes the peanuts and Cracker Jack. If you ever spilled Egyptian hieroglyphics onto a Jackson Pollock painting, you might get something resembling Langer's 51s vs. Sacramento River Cats scorecard.
He told me there are a bunch of boxes in a closet in a spare bedroom that contain modern art - er, score sheets - from every game that Langer has ever broadcast, about 2,900 in all.
He said he never looks at them; doesn't really keep them for posterity's sake. But he says when he gets to where he's going (the major leagues), he thinks they'll serve as a reminder of where he has been and, more importantly, how hard he worked to leave it all behind.
Josh Ringler
If you're really serious about keeping score, you buy your own book in which to do it. I could immediately tell that John Ringler, a 40-year-old history teacher and assistant basketball coach at Foothill High in Henderson, was serious about keeping score - not so much because he had his own book, but because there were only two blank pages remaining in it.
Ringler said he started keeping score at ballgames after his wife showed him how.
That's right, his wife. Ringler said he and the missus, who grew up in a big family of scorekeeping Cubs fans, met in Seattle. When the Mariners got hot in '95, she showed him how to relive a Ken Griffey Jr. home run by jotting a symbol onto his score sheet.
Ringler said he used to keep score at his kids' games until the other parents started questioning why he had scored their little Johnny's two-hopper that the opposing shortstop had booted into the next county as a two-base error instead of a double.
I asked Ringler, who was sitting alone after his son and the neighbor kid had gone off in search of a Sno-Kone, if people approached him at games and asked why he keeps score.
"Not really," he said.
"I think most people think it's weird and they just leave you alone."
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