Box scores energize nostalgia of baseball

The past arrives in my email inbox every morning.
A few weeks ago, I saw something about a free service that delivers box scores from Major League Baseball games every morning in the style of how they would have been printed in newspapers back in the days when that was the only way to get such information.
There was no way I could pass up subscribing. 
When you’re a kid growing up a baseball fan in the Midwest in the pre-Internet, pre-ESPN SportsCenter days, the box score was your connection to your favorite team.
My morning routine was always the same — go through the state edition of the Des Moines Register (someday, maybe, we’ll reminisce about The Big Peach) and check out the standings, the pitching matchups, and the box scores. Granted, most of the box scores were already more than a day old, but when your favorite team is on the West Coast and you might get to see them on TV a few times during the season, that’s how you kept up on what they were doing.
On weekends, a co-worker of my dad’s would drop off his weekly copy of The Sporting News, which published every box score of every game every week. That, combined with the weekly notebook stories written by beat writers of each team, was a baseball fan’s heaven.
When we started getting USA Today in town, we were introduced to the expanded box score, which was full of added information that enhanced the experience. The baseball pages of the national newspaper became the model for so many other papers in the 1980s and 1990s.
When the day came that I was in charge of the sports section at the newspaper where I worked, I always made sure there was a baseball page every day, with scores, a brief summary of the games the night before, and whatever box scores were available by the 11 p.m. deadline for the page. If we could squeeze in the league leaders, we would.

It didn’t take long, in the days of cost-cutting that befell the daily print newspaper, for the box scores to go away. Something had to go when space was cut, and the feeling among those at the bigger sports sections was that fans could go get their box scores from ESPN’s website, or Major League Baseball’s site, or wherever.
I fought such a cut until my final days in my old job, when the devastation of my section by our corporate raiders made it impossible for it to continue. It wasn’t long after my position’s elimination when I ran into readers who said that was one of the things they missed the most about our section.
Of course we live in the information-at-our-fingertips era, where the box score seems obsolete. As I write this, I’m hearing my phone buzz with game notifications. And it has become an October tradition, if you’ve ever noticed, of covering a Holy Trinity postseason volleyball match with notebook in one hand, and my phone resting on my leg giving me pitch-by-pitch updates of the Dodgers in the playoffs or the World Series (there have been a few strange looks from those who hear my muttering if something bad happens).
You can still get the box score, it’s just a couple of clicks away. But it’s not the same.
Which is why, when I saw the opportunity to get box scores that look like the old days, I had to do it.
Two emails come in every morning from a website called boxscore, right at 5 a.m. One is an email dedicated to the box score from the previous day’s Dodgers game, with NL West standings and team statistics to go with it. A second email has the box score from every game, with standings from every division and statistical leaders from each league, along with pitching matchups and game times for that day’s games.
The morning routine is now the same like it was in the past — scan the box scores, the standings, and the pitching matchups.
All of it looks just like it did in the old days. And there’s something comforting about that.
John Bohnenkamp is an national award-winning reporter and columnist, and a regular contributor to Pen City Current sports.