Yeah Im just now realizing how the baseball scoring conventions are basically a DSL for a baseball game. There is a standardized way for expressing what happens in a game. I wonder if this has been leveraged in any interesting programs.

here is an example inning:

K | 6-3 | BB | 2B (RBI, R1-H) | F8

How do you differentiate a swinging strike-out from a looking strike-out when you can't turn the K upside down?

Unicode FTW: "𝼃"

By upside down you mean backwards, yea?

So... ꓘ

Yes it's a 180 degree rotation.

I suppose you could do K(S) or K(L) pretty easily and without any specially coded characters. Or Unicode as another poster suggested.

As non-MLB watcher, I have only a passing knowledge of the game why does it matter if the strike-out is swinging or not?

To use a Cricket analogy you don't differentiate if or what the stroke was at the time they were LBW, stumped, bowled caught out.

It doesn't really matter. But it's a datapoint that, say a batter has a lot of strike outs looking, they may have a poor sense of the strike zone. Or if a batter has a high swinging strike out rate then it says that their pitches are deceptive and have a lot of movement.

It doesn't matter any more or less than if an out was a line-out, fly out, or ground-ball thrown to first.

While away, I thought of an example.

In baseball, the baserunners are allowed to advance to the next base at any time the ball is "in play" which includes when the pitcher (vaguely similar to bowler in cricket) is holding the ball.

When a baserunner tries to advance without the ball ever being hit, this is called a "steal."

When the baserunner and batter are coordinating so that the batter will try to hit the ball during a steal, this is called a "hit and run." The idea is that the infielders will be getting in position to get the runner out, so won't be in good position to play a ground-ball hit by the batter.

So consider a play where a batter strikes out, then the baserunner is thrown out trying to advance (a strike-out throw-out double play). If it's a swinging strike, that might be a failed hit and run, but if it's a strikeout looking, then it's almost certainly a failed attempt at a steal (with the minority of the time it being the batter missing the signal for a hit and run).

I should acknowledge that 2 strikes with fewer than 2 outs is not considered a good count to try a hit and run; unless a poor batsman is up next you are often better off having a fresh count with the next batter. On the other hand a hit and run is really only effective when it's a surprise.

In baseball you DO differentiate between whether you struck out swinging or looking.

It matters for the pitcher because if you can disguise your pitch well enough that it looks like a ball coming in but is actually a strike, so that the hitter doesn't even try to hit it, that is a great signal.

As a batter, you typically* want to swing at strikes, so you want to know if you are letting hittable pitches go by. From the time baseball players are like 10 years old, you'll hear coaches and parents yelling "be a hitter, don't strike out looking!".

* there are always situations you probably don't want to swing, like if you have 3 balls and no strikes, you usually want to not swing, and assume you'll get another ball and will get walked to get on base. There are a lot of other situations where you do or don't swing, and the strikeout looking vs swinging measures that.

There's a standardized way to express what is happening in the game too- you'll often hear on the radio and television broadcasts the play that just happened using numbered positions on the field. 1 is pitcher, 2 is catcher, 3 is first baseman, 4 is second, 5 is third, 6 is shortstop, etc. so you'll hear something like "6-4-3 double play" which means the ball was fielded by the shortstop (6), thrown to the second baseman (4) for the first out, then to the first baseman (3) for the second one.

Makes it easy to visualize the game if listening on the radio.

When I coach my youth teams, I always list their positions by number. I derive some minor benefit from doing that, but I'm also hoping that by having them learn the position numbers, it will make it easier for them to enjoy audio broadcasts of baseball games. There's a special kind of fun in listening to those.

I think we are saying the same thing. This is the same as scoring the game they are just saying it out loud. Maybe my example didnt pick the most illustrative details.

Retrosheet is a project which reconstructs historical baseball games from old newspaper accounts, scorescards purchased at estate sales, and other means. They actually have an ASCII scorecard format:

https://www.retrosheet.org/eventfile.htm

Originally to parse these out people used MS-DOS utilities written by the guy who made the Diamond Mind Baseball game. There's a more modern set of utilities called Chadwick now so you don't have to use DOS.