Official Scorer Feature Overview

The Official Scorer™ is a feature rich customizable baseball/softball web site that allows managers to rapidly created personalized team portals.   The Official Scorer provides a powerful set of capabilities for managers of baseball and softball teams including team home page, photo gallery, team links, awards, news, broadcast news, result notification, scheduling, scorecards, lineup sheets, box scores, and seasonal and career batting, pitching, and fielding statistics.   This overview highlights the high-level capabilities of The Official Scorer.   For additional information, please see the Help page.

Features
Security and Privacy	Access to your team site will require three login credentials: team name, username, and password.   This keeps your site news, images, roster data, and statistics as private as you desire.   In addition, you may activate a guest login to allow non-players—such as family and friends—to visit your site.   You choose whether or not to allow the guest user to see individual player stats and player roster information.   You choose whether or not to allow each player to see all player stats or only his or her own stats.
Home page	Customizable web sites for baseball and softball teams.   Set up your own site easily.   Display news, including auto-generated time-triggered items, schedules, rosters, awards, photos, stats, and communicate with coaches, players, family, and friends.    Customizable team home page where you can place your own team news, use your own team logo in the site banner, and show up to 3 images.  In addition, you may choose from amongst several "auto-generated" news items including Last Game Result, Next Game Notice, and Schedule.  In addition, you optionally may include a weather sticker on every page of your site—showing a recent weather report for your locale.
Broadcast News	Choose any (or all) of your site's home page news items and broadcast them via email to your roster of players.   With this Broadcast News feature, you can reach out to your players with your news rather than relying upon your players to visit the site.   The roster serves as a group mail list.
Notification	Publish results of your games as they occur to an audience outside of your team roster.   For example, at the conclusion of your most recent game, easily generate with a single button click an email message to a list of one or more recipients including your league administrator, local newspaper, or affiliates.
Photo Gallery	Upload and display an unlimited number of team images to share with your teammates.
Team Links	Create your own page of your favorite team links.   Organize your links by category.   When your teammates click on these links, an addiitional browser will be launched with the web site address you provide.
Awards	Create and publish awards for deserving players.   These awards can be shown on your team awards page; most recent awards can be published on your team home page as well.   Choose from amongst the following list of available awards: Most Valuable Player, Rookie of the Year, Player of the Week, Player of the Month, Player of the Year, Pitcher of the Week, Pitcher of the Month, Pitcher of the Year, Most Improved Player, Most Inspirational Player, Most Improved Player, Best Team Spirit, Fireman of the Year, Golden Glove, Silver Slugger, Cy Young, and Hall of Fame.
Roster	Team roster entries for each of your players and coaches include the following attributes: name, 2 phone numbers, 2 email addresses, uniform number, username, password, default fielding position, batting (left, right, switch) orientation, throwing arm (right, left), roster status (active or inactive), and disabled list status.   Roster entries for each of your players are required, of course, to allow you to record game stats; the roster also serves as a known repository for contact information for your entire team. Supplying email addresses for each roster member allows the manager to create and broadcast news items via email (e.g., schedule changes or rainouts).
Schedule	For each of your seasons (e.g., Summer 2002, Fall 2003), create and maintain an up-to-date schedule.   Instead of having to print and distribute your schedule with each update, your players can look to your site each time they desire to see the latest schedule—including using the schedule page as their notification of game-day status (e.g., for rainouts).   You may even find that you no longer will be required to phone each member of your team with late breaking schedule news—training them to rely upon your site for the latest schedule updates will turn out to be a great time-saver for managers. You can schedule practices, regular season games, and post-season or tournament games within a season's schedule.   As you enter your game results your team's won-loss record will be reflected on your schedule.   The following attributes are available for each game: season, date, time, playing field, home v. away, opponent, event status (postponed, suspended, cancelled, forfeit-win, or forfeit-loss), and game type (regular season, practice, playoff, or tournament).   Separately, you establish your set of playing venues or fields—you may provide your own written directions to these fields or with an accurate address let MapQuest provide a map; these directions will then be accessible via your on-line schedule.   Lastly, a printable schedule feature allows you to generate a hand-out copy of your schedule.
Multiple Seasons	Create an unlimited number of "seasons".   This seasons feature allows the team manager to differentiate one team calendar of games from another; your team may utilize an unlimited number of seasons per year.   Associated with each season would be a unique game schedule and, therefore, game results—including won-loss records and individual statistics.   As soon as you've created your second season, your players will start to accumulate career statistics.   Of course, if you continue to use The Official Scorer over the course of multiple years, your historical data continues to be available—and your career stats accumulate.
Lineup, Scorecards, and Lineup Cards	Use the Lineup feature to "think and tinker" on-line regarding your best possible batting order.   Using the result of your thinking, print out your game-day scorecard to use to record your results as they occur.   Also, using the lineup you've decided upon, print out game-day lineup cards that you can hand out to your opponent and umpires as needed.   Player name, uniform number, and fielding position are included in these cards—in the proper batting order.   Available substitutes are also included on the lineup card.   Conveniently, when you go to enter your post-game batting data, you will be prompted for this data in the same order in which you set up your lineup.
Overall Game Results	The game data overall data entry form enables managers to enter team-wide post-game information such as the number of runners left on base by each team, inning-by-inning linescore (runs scored per team by inning), and highlights. These latter three data elements appear on your game boxscores if entered. In addition, the manager chooses here when to publish the results of a game (allowing the manager to take his or her time entering and verifying the data before it is exposed to teammates). When the data has been verified, a single button click from this page will trigger the Notification feature described above.
Hitting Statistics	Track and analyze all the classic baseball and softball hitting statistics on a game-by-game, season-by-season, and career basis.   Sort the season summary by any category you choose.   Popular Sabermetric measures are included as well.   The following stats are tracked for hitting: games played, official at bats (and, indirectly plate appearances), runs scored, bases on balls, hit by pitch, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, runs batted in, total bases, sacrifice hits, sacrifice flies, times reached on error, strikeouts, double plays, stolen bases, times caught stealing, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, on-base plus slugging percentage, slugging percentage times on-base percentage, runs created, runs created per game, and batting average.   Of course, you only enter the minimum data that is needed—the rest of the stats are calculated for you.   If you opt for privacy, each player will only be able to see his or her stats plus the team totals.   Click here to view a sample hitting summary.
Pitching Statistics	Track and analyze all the classic baseball and softball pitching statistics on a game-by-game, season-by-season, and career basis.   Sort the season summary by any category you choose.   Popular Sabermetric measures are included as well.   The following stats are tracked for pitching: won-loss (and tie) record, earned run average, games pitched, games started, complete games, shutouts, saves, blown saves, innings pitched, number of pitches thrown, batters faced, hits allowed, doubles allowed, triples allowed, home runs allowed, runs allowed, earned runs allowed, bases on balls, strikeouts, hit batters, wild pitches, balks, pickoffs, ground outs, fly/line outs, holds, winning percentage, save percentage, innings pitched per start, on-base percentage, walks-plus-hits per inning pitched, and strikeout-walks ratio.   Of course, you only enter the minimum data that is needed—the rest of the stats are calculated for you.   If you opt for privacy, each player will only be able to see his or her stats plus the team totals.   Click here to view a sample pitching summary.
Fielding Statistics	Track and analyze all the classic baseball and softball fielding statistics on a game-by-game, season-by-season, and career basis.   Sort the season summary by any category you choose.   Popular Sabermetric measures are included as well.   The following stats are tracked for fielding: games played, chances, put outs, assists, errors, double plays, and fielding percentage.   For catchers, the followings stats are also tracked: passed balls, stolen base attempts against, and runners caught stealing.   Of course, you only enter the minimum data that is needed—the rest of the stats are calculated for you.   If you opt for privacy, each player will only be able to see his or her stats plus the team totals.
Boxscores	Professional newspaper quality box scores are provided for each and every game (where you supply the data).   Game summary, hitting lines for each hitter—including at bats, runs scored, RBIs, walks, strikeouts, and up-to-this-game batting averages—left on base, hitting highlights—e.g., doubles, triples, and home runs with up-to-this-game totals—and pitching lines for each pitcher—including innings pitched, hits allowed, runs allowed, earned runs allowed, walks, strikeouts, number of pitches, batters faced, and up-to-this-game earned run averages are shown.   In addition, inning-by-inning line scores are shown for each game.   Finally, you can enter any highlight descriptive text you like (such as "how they scored" or other commentary).   If you opt for privacy, the up-to-this-game numbers are omitted.   The box scores are generated automatically based upon the game data you enter.   Click here to view a sample boxscore.
Leaderboard	The leaderboard shows the top 5 contributors in several categories in a professional newspaper-like summary chart.   For hitting, the following measures are shown: batting average (with games played, at bats, runs scored, hits and batting average), home runs, doubles, triples, runs scored, runs batted in, slugging percentage, hits, stolen bases, total bases, walks, and on-base percentage.   For pitching, the following stats are shown: victories (won-loss record), earned run average, saves, complete games, strikeouts, innings pitched, games played, and shutouts.   The team manager controls two aspects of the leaderboard: minimum number of innings pitched to qualify as a pitcher and minimum number of plate appearances per game to qualify as a batter.   Click here to view a sample leaderboard.
Standings	For each of your seasons, you can track your league standings using the Standings feature.   Since The Official Scorer web site is a team-oriented site, league-wide information is not automatically available— therefore, the team manager must enter the win-loss-tie records for all of your league opponents (winning percentage, standings order, and games behind are calculated for you).   Your team record is tracked based upon your game data. The result is a league standings report that, in professional newspaper fashion, shows the teams in first-to-last order including won-loss records, winning percentage, and games behind.   You may optionally choose to include an automatically calculated "magic number" indication as well.
Help, Glossary, FAQs, Links	In addition to this feature overview, the Help page provides more insight into how to use The Official Scorer.   The Glossary page defines all Official Scorer terms, including all baseball vernacular.   The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page provides answers to questions we have been asked most often about The Official Scorer.   Finally, the Help page includes a set of "helpful links" that provide other sources of baseball knowledge and interest.