The three ways to record a game, and which to pick

All three end up in the same place: ordinary at-bats, one per plate appearance. Whichever you use, your batting line, your season totals, the team's table and the CSV export read the game the same way, and nothing has to be converted afterwards. What differs is how much detail goes in beside the outcome, how much there is to do while the game is happening, and whether the choice can still be changed later.

One at-bat at a time is the recorder: pick the outcome, tap the field if you saw where the ball went, set the RBIs, save. It is offered on every game — one you keep on your own or a team game — on both apps, during the game or days afterwards, and you can stop with half a game entered and come back to it. It asks nothing of the game beforehand — no roster, no batting order, nothing already recorded — which is why it is the one that is always there.

A whole game from a box score takes totals instead of plays: at-bats, hits, extra-base hits, walks, strikeouts, the two ways of reaching without a hit, runs, RBIs and steals, for each player, in one pass. It is how a game somebody kept on paper gets in, and the only way to enter a teammate's whole night without recording their at-bats one by one. What it cannot carry is where the balls went, so a line typed this way is on no spray chart.

Play by play, as it happens, is live scoring: innings, outs, who is on which base, the line score, and a play log the rest of the team watches update on their own devices. It works the RBIs out for you from where the runners finish, and it is the only one that produces an inning-by-inning account of the game rather than a set of batting lines. It also asks the most while the game is on, since somebody has to be in the app for every plate appearance.

Two of the three are interchangeable on the same game, in both directions. Record a few at-bats by hand and the box score will still open on that game, with everybody's current line already in it; type a game in from a box score and it still takes new at-bats one at a time afterwards. Live scoring is the one that has to be settled first: Score this game live is only offered on a team game that nobody has recorded on yet and that has not been finished, so it is a decision made before the first pitch rather than after the last one.

Once a game is in the play log, the box score closes to it, and that is deliberate. The log works the score and every stat out from the plays it recorded, so a line typed over those at-bats would leave the log describing rows that no longer exist. So the box-score link is not on a game being scored live, and it stays off after it is final — and the at-bat rows stop opening for editing too. Corrections there go through the log instead, where everything after the play you fix is recalculated.

Two of them also want a team. Live scoring is offered on team games only, because the batting order and the roster are what it advances through. The box score needs a roster on the phone for the same reason, though the website will also open it on a game you keep on your own, with one row in it for you. The recorder asks for nothing: a solo game recorded on a phone is entered at-bat by at-bat.

None of the three ends the game. That is its own step, and on a game scored live it happens somewhere else entirely.