Last year, I wrote a long post on scorekeeping in baseball. An hour before I headed to my first MLB game of 2023 with my scorebook in hand, I realized there was a new element to track: pitch clock violations that end a plate appearance. If a batter takes too long, they are assessed a strike. If a pitcher takes too long, the count gets an additional ball. It’s totally possible that a pitch clock violation would result in either third strike, or fourth ball, of a count and directly cause a strikeout or walk without a final pitch being thrown.
That’s such an odd scenario that I want a way to denote it. I did a little research and found this excellent article with quotes from various official MLB scorekeepers. It’ll take time to decide on a standard, but I opted for circling either the K or BB on my scorecard to mean that the result was due to a final pitch clock violation.
By sheer dumb luck, this happened on my second game of the season. In the image below, you can see two consecutive walks. The first was standard, the second had the 4th ball occur on a pitcher’s clock violation.
It’s interesting to have new wrinkles to deal with. Last year it was the Manfred runner for me. We’ll see what comes next.