New Season, New Rule

Well, the battery in my phone is all crapped up, ya know? That's what happens when you don't fully charge it, then you use it and then you partially charge it again, then maybe you run it down and then you partially charge it and use it again. So I've got this "phone" which is really more like a little computer cum camera cum GPS cum MLB score tool. But most of the time, when I want this device to do one of the things I want it to do, the battery is low and it craps out while I'm doing it. Or not doing it.

[This is known as the "memory effect," a term for the very real changes that can occur in NiCad rechargeable batteries, but is often misapplied to what is actually just a aging power cell. Wikipedia makes me smart.]

So, my phone was dead this morning before I went to wiffle. So there's no picture of the final score to share.

Sorry. It was Visitors 5, Home 3. It would have looked something like this:

Diagram 1:Simulated Final Score Photo (Do Not Attempt)

Except that the pavement isn't really pure black, and the slanting morning sun has richer tones this time of year.

As you can easily deduce from Diagram 1, eight runs were scored today.  What you can't tell is that none of these runs were scored, as they say, in bunches. No team put up more than two runs in any inning.  To make that clear we would need a different kind of score board.  One more like this:

Diagram 2: Simulated experimental scoreboard (maybe attempt)

Again the pavement here is wrong, but the score diagram does tell you more about the game. I think you'll agree. Of course, Diagram 2 has a lot of blank squares, wherein more game did happen. For example, in the square that is the bottom of the fourth inning, Kurt allowed the first walk under the "hit the pole" rule.  He walked Kevin Campbell, a wise choice as he had two triples and a homer on the day.

But the blank spaces continue to beguile, and so maybe the proper use of this, shall we say, "Hand-Operated Score Board" would look more like this:

Diagram 3: Simulated "Hand Operated Score Board" (liking this more and more)

This can be a little confusing because the mixed use of tally marks and Arabic numerals, but we're all adults here, eh? Try to see past the pavement color. It would not be necessary to use three colors of chalk; indeed that would use a lot of chalk.

It occurred to me today that a new battery would make an ideal Father's Day gift.

Kurt, Matt - 5
Kevin, Pete - 3

W: Lindsay
L: Berwald
HR: Campbell