The truth is, I don’t pay much close attention to sports anymore. I mean, I know who’s in the baseball playoffs and who’s off to a good start in the NFL and stuff like that. But I haven’t gone to a game in person in a long time. Hardly watch any of it on television these days, too.
But each day, at some point—maybe when I’m trying to distract myself from some obligation I have—I check box scores. Baseball, basketball, college or pro, even football. I just love box scores.
There is something both alluringly simple and brilliantly mysterious about box scores. In a few columns of numbers, they tell an almost-entire narrative of what transpired over two or three hours on a field or in an arena somewhere. They are both terribly precise and marvelously open-ended, sort of like novels where the author outlines the characters and the reader gets to mentally fill in the details.
They’ve been around almost since the beginning of organized sport. Henry Chadwick, an English-born American sportswriter, probably invented the baseball box score sometime around the 1850s. He wanted readers to understand more than just which team had won, so he developed a compact way to record what individual players and teams had accomplished, making it possible to compare performances across games and seasons. His idea ultimately spread to other sports.
Chadwick’s box score included the obvious data, like at bats, runs, hits, errors. Basically, that’s what we grew up with. But today’s box score, of course, in our age of technology and hyper-statistical analysis, has a lot more numbers, and we can learn, apparently, a great deal more from them. Whether we want to or not.
In baseball, a quick glimpse at a box score will now provide us with José Ramirez’s on-base percentage as well as his slugging percentage, in addition to his hits and at bats. In basketball, a glance at a box score naturally tells us how many points Anthony Edwards scored, on how many field goal attempts, but also what his +/- rating was—that is, how his team fared when he was on the floor.
A football box score will tell you not just how many passes Jayden Daniels completed out of how many passing attempts, and what the average gain was, but also his QBR—the mystifyingly obscure evaluation of how his quarterbacking rated.
Whatever the sport, here in just a jumble of digits is a small statistical portrait of an entire game. It may be boiled down to its essence, but over days, over games, you can see trends—Mookie Betts is in a slump; Jalen Brunson has been really nailing those 3-pointers; Josh Allen is on a hot passing streak.
The numbers, of course, don’t tell you the whole story. You don’t get the rhythm of a game, the ebb and flow of an athletic contest. Three hours of sweat and skill is reduced to just a column of bloodless numbers.
You can’t tell from the box score, for instance, if one of Shohei Ohtani’s homers came after an excruciatingly long, back-and-forth at bat or if it was the determining factor in a 3-2 victory. You don’t know which of LeBron’s assists came from a behind-the-back pass in the last seconds of the third quarter to give his team the lead for the first time. And you can’t figure out which sack of Matthew Stafford led to the fumble that led to the opponent’s touchdown that led to defeat.
But you can compare player to player, and this game to yesterday’s game, and get the big, very quick picture of what happened that you had missed if you didn’t go to the stadium or turned on the television.
That’s the allure of the box score.