I find it less helpful.

Nice effort, but wow, it would get old having to tally everything up myself for each game. The current system is quick and easy.

This is less a box score than a score card

It's got its merits, but it'd only work online. Just imagine the space you'd need in a newspaper for a 14 to 11 fifteen inning game.

This is less a box score than a score card

That's what I thought at first, too, but that's even worse, because you can't know in advance where to place the spaces between innings.

I applaud the creativity. I think it would make a fantastic scorecard. I wonder how difficult it would be to do this same type of thing with just pencil and paper. Simulating the multiple colors would be the trick.

This reminds me of another very creative chart. It's a History of the New York Yankees chart.

I think of the box score as a summary of the game, this doesn't come close to that

I do not like this graphic at all. It's complicated, it takes up a lot of space, and it provides more data but less analysis or information than a box score does. In two-dimensional grids, a box score gives you information about each player and the team totals simultaneously.

Even a scorecard-like arrangement of two grids / sequences of little baseball diamonds (like the BBTF support patron icons) would be a more useful blend of box score / play-by-play recap into one graphic than what's proposed here. You would highlight the bases to show runners on, show lines of different weights on the basepaths to represent the progress of the batter in his plate appearance (and as a baserunner), and fill in the diamond to represent a run scored, etc.

Edward Tufte, a guru of presenting information graphically, refers to this type of arrangement of data as "small multiples." You present many similar small pictures in different states. The reader orients himself to the basic graphic element once, which is then repeated to illustrate the point. In this case, the baseball diamond is the familiar element. The stacked bar presented in the link is a feeble, hard-to-understand attempt at a small multiple.

In his one-day course on presenting information, Tufte proclaims the virtues of sports statistics printed in the newspaper. Box scores and league standings tables are high density tables (thousands of numbers, few graphics) that are understood by tens of millions of Americans.

(He contrasts this with the sparsity of the typical PowerPoint slide that most of us encounter in professional presentations and wonders why most speakers expect very little of their audiences. I recommend Tufte's books highly if you are interested, professionally or otherwise, in presenting information.)

IF you wanted to condense the proposed graphic, you could use a "sparkline." Tufte has also done a lot to popularize sparklines, or word-sized graphics useful for depicting sequences and time-series of data, such as the W-L and standings progress of a team over a season. On his message board in 2006, he posted:

Here's a sketch of the results of the last 25 or 30 at bats for a baseball player. A period is an out; a slash a walk; the verticals singles, doubles, triples, and home runs; and the whiskers beneath are the resulting runs batted in from that at bat.

It's actually 27 plate appearances. I'll use S, D, T, H instead of verticals for the basehits and arabic numbers instead of whiskers for the RBI.:

...../../.S...S.DD..T...H..
        1     1  2  1   3 1

I would think you could adapt such a scheme to present play-by-play sequences in a very small space. Here's my best shot of a portion the poster's example, the Phillies batting innings from game one of the 2009 World Series, with each inning separated by a space:

../D/. ... ..H. ... ... .H.S. /:. //../S. .DSS.D<u>.</u>
             1           1             2    1  1 

I added : to represent a double play and I underlined the final out, which was a baserunning out, to distinguish it from a batter's out. It's not all the information, but it's a quick and dirty start, presented in far less space.

Other changes I thought to make, that I tried out below:
- change the / to a W for walk
- change the strikeouts from . to K
- add a row representing the batter's place in the batting order


123456 789 1234 567 891 23456 789 1234567 8912342
..WDW. ... ..HK KK. K.. .HKSK W:. WWK.WS. .DSS.D<u>.</u>
             1           1             2    1  1 

EDITED for format