This Baseball Nerd Just Couldn't Take the Pressure

One of my fondest memories as a child is the time my dad taught me how to score a baseball game. I was 10 years old and I became obsessed with "keeping the book" while watching the Twins on television (I believe those were the Midwest Sports Channel days). My scorebook had about a dozen or so games in it before the postseason came along. I kept score for every ALCS game without a problem.

Then it was the World Series. I started keeping score for every game of that series . . . and I stopped scoring around the 5th or 6th inning of every single game (I think I stopped watching game 5 altogether). I absolutely could not handle the nerves of writing simple letters and numbers in a book any longer. I remember actually throwing that book away a few years later (that was obviously a dumb thing to do) and looking back at those games and my failed attempts to complete a single game from that series with a laugh.

There are a lot of memories that a lot of Twins fans have of that series: the Puckett game (6) and the Morris game (7), Ron Gant clearly throwing himself off of first base and Kent Hrbek trying to simply help stop him, etc. For me, it is when this baseball nerd became a nervous 10-year-old fan again.