High School Stats

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Went to watch a friends DD play a double header on Saturday. Their team won the first game; they played really well against a good team. They lost the second game, but had lots of errors. Matter of fact the dads keeping stats around us calculated 11 to 13 errors. Without those errors they win the game. This happens, no big deal, you learn from it and move on.

While reading the box scores in the Dispatch Sunday, I saw the box score and under the error column there was a ZERO. WOW, is this real or a misprint. I called my friend and asked if he saw this and he just laughed. Seems the coaches have not been reporting the errors to the papers and the coaches are having him check with them before he records a hit or an error in the dugout book.

My question is what does a coach have to gain by this? Is it so important for these kids to get their names in the paper that coaches lie and give them something they do not deserve? What are we teaching these young athletes about life? Are some of these coaches? egos so big that they are willing to lie?

I went back and looked at last year?s state leaders and wondered how many of these stats are real and how many are not. The 2012 stats are due to be out in the Dispatch soon, I truly wonder how many of these players have earned what they have. Or is this just an isolated occurrence.

 

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It happens all the time. I would say from what our high school posts don't even bother looking at them because they are WAY off from the truth!!!

 

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that is why I always kept my own stats.

 

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Stinks if your a pitcher, I'd say.

 

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Heck, I've now coached at the D2 and D3 levels of college and it's far from perfect there, too. I keep my own stats. I'd estimate about 33% of the scorers at these games are pretty much clueless. Often the SID will hire a student or maybe a grad student and kind of teach them how to score a game. That pretty much always results in a disaster.

 

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Happens all the time at every level. I like to keep my own stats.

 

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Wrap your head in duct tape so it doesn't explode lol.

 

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That's funny!! :lmao: :lmao: :lmao:

 

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here is an example of how bad it is.. 3 year scorer for this team and her assistant (until I explained this last night) believed that the errors in the box score were for the opposing team?? Meaning for three years they have reported the amount of errors their team made with the scores of their opponnents? crazy..

I keep very close eye on stats and I actually have a goal to find ways to make record keeping improve in highschool softball. At least in our league and maybe central district.. I know it will never be perfect, but I think we have duty to improve as many awards that we give out are based upon the athlete's statistics..

 

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I was looking at the reported score from our game last night compared to my book. I can't imagine what game the other scorer was at. Here was my line.

Team A - 4 9 3
Team B - 3 3 1

Here was the published box score

Team A - 4 7 3
Team B - 3 6 1

The errors match, I don't think we have any funny stuff going on with errors.

I looked at Team B's players that reached base. Here was the breakdown.
9 total players reached base
2 - walks
1 - fielder's choice (out recorded on rundown between 3rd and home)
3 - hits (single and infield hit in second, single in 7th)
3 - errors (E4/GB, E8 on fly ball, 6-4 E4 on catch)
(1) - caught stealing
(1)– FC rundown between 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] and home
28 total batters (21 outs plus 9 reached base minus 2 picked off).

So my Team B book looks square - where did the three extra hits come from? One possible explanation is that when the fielding team gets an error, then the hitting team also gets a hit. (I would normally suspect the fielder's choice column being incorrectly recorded, but since there was only one FC that doesn't add up - unless both FC and walks are also hits.)


In looking at Team A's book, I have:
17 total players reached base
3 - reached on walk
2 - reached on hit by pitch
1 - reached on E - so that accounts for the one error
2 – FC
9 – hits
36 total batters (21 outs plus 17 baserunners (38) minus 1 player caught in DP minus 1 called out for INF)

But the line only shows 7 hits, so I am not sure what happened to those other two batters.

So – It was an interesting game, but the accounting doesn’t add up!

 

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Doesnt add up just like the govt. We all know how You score Mark

Actually one of the better ones out there Who's honest Either side of the ball......

 

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I guess I had better not get started on this again this year. I started a thread just like this last year. I suggest you print out the rules for those keeping the books. http://www.whitbygirlssoftball.com/resourcz/files/atec.pdf I think Joe pointed this our last year. The bigger issue is those that just flat out cheat to inflat numbers so kids on some teams make first team ( ***). It happens all the time in high school. Some conferences now have both coaches look at the books and sign off on each persons stats.

 

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HS parents are in for a shock when they reach college. Score keepers at the college level are ruthless. Theres a reason they stay behind locked doors in the announcer tower at games.

Tim

 

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Several reasons for this but a WHOLE BUNCH is because Coach A doesn't believe that Coach B is going to be accurate so he isn't either. If you are honest and give your center fielder 3 errors for a season and another coach has the same position with 4 errors but doesn't report it then the first player could be unfairly looked over when going for league, etc. honors.

They see it as leveling the playing field and there is quite a bit of truth to it.

 

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Reading this makes me shake my head in utter disgust. That's hack coaching. Publish reality...anything else is flat out a lie.

 

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HS parents are in for a shock when they reach college.

Tim

Boy you are not kidding there.......no more over inflated .575 average, no more 0.25 era's........no more cup cake schedules......

 

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Boy you are not kidding there.......no more over inflated .575 average, no more 0.25 era's........no more cup cake schedules......

They dont take bribes, they dont want to be your friend and they dont care how good you think your kid is doing. Im not saying they are heartless, but i saw one sell his mothers body to the medical department......and she was still alive

 

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There's all kinds of reasons for bad high school stats ... coaches trying to help their players and/or make them and their team look good, scorekeeping parents who want to make their own kid or their kids' friends look good, newspapers mis-printing or messing up what gets sent in, etc., but if I had to single out what I think the biggest problem is it's that people just don't know how to keep score. When my daughter was 15, she joined a new travel team. They scored a run from third on a wild pitch early in the first game, and the mother of the girl at bat yelled out something like "hey, there's an RBI" to her daughter. I laughed out loud because I thought she was kidding, and she looked at me kind of funny and I said "you know that's not an RBI, right?". She gave me a dirty look and snapped back "I had an older daugther play too and I have been the official scorekeeper at the high school for the last 5 years and I certainly know how to keep score and yes, that is an RBI!" I just shut up and thought wow ... and that's all you need to keep in mind about high school stats ...

 

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coachjwb, I use to think the same thing, but now I'm convinced it is inflating stats in high school. I know coaches that know better but will give a kid a hit instead of recording an erorr. Or give a kid a triple when the outfielder makes an error on the play. I have watched to many games and noted errors that are not reported as such and all become hits in the paper. It has been bad for years and most high school coaches will tell you how bad it is. I watched a kid slap the ball and she made it to third base, guess what it was a triple last night. Of course it was mis played multi times. Talk to any college coach and high school stats are worthless. There is a local kid batting over 500, that won't get a hit when that team plays us, but I bet she wins first team all conference when the votes are cast. I will cust and paste for you some high school stats when they are released. They are almost funny. One team who didn't have many wins had three kids listed as leaders in stolen bases. Every PB was a stolen base.

 

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No doubt the "inflation" is happening, but I stand by my opinion that it's more just "ignorance". And I know several high school coaches that do absolutely nothing with the books, like correct them when the scorekeeper does something wrong, or even call them into the paper for that matter ... they delegate it all out. I know scorekeepers and pitchers' parents who think a ball that is misplayed in the outfield is an error even if no one touched the ball and/or if the sun or wind caused them to miss it. I have run into tons of people who keep score who have no clue what a fielder's choice even is, let alone how to differentiate between earned runs and unearned runs, between wild pitches and passed balls, or between sacrifices and fielder's choices. When some people see the obviously wrong boxscores, they assume "cheating", while others who don't understand scorkeeping at all just assume they're right.

At the end of my daughter's one season in high school, she had a particularly rough game where the opponents (home team) scored 8 runs (4 earned if I remember) on 10 hits, but the boxscore in the local newspaper showed 22 hits and all of the runs were earned. At first, I thought maybe it was just a misprint, but I got to thinking about it and went back to our book and counted that between hits, walks, errors and about 5 fielder's choices that a total of 22 runners did in fact reach base. I laughed it off at the time because she hadn't allowed 22 hits in probably the previous 7-8 games combined, but oh well. About a month later, I ran into a sportwriter for that newspaper who I had got to know when our daughters played together one summer, and do you know he asked me about what happened that my daughter had given up 22 hits in one game, implying that was a reason she didn't get area recognition from the newspaper at the end of the season?

It is what it is ... and there's not much anyone can do to change it. As Tim says above, college is a whole different matter.