How We Build Every Scorecard: Our Data Sources

Every Field & Ink scorecard is built from the official play-by-play record — scored from the same data that baseball historians, researchers, and the game itself relies on. Here's exactly where that data comes from and how we verify it.

Retrosheet — The Foundation

Retrosheet's data is free to use for non-commercial and commercial purposes with attribution (their license terms require crediting the source). We comply with this requirement on every scorecard and on this page.

How We Use the Data

For each game, we parse the Retrosheet event file for that game into a sequence of play-by-play actions: every at-bat, every base advancement, every pitching change, every run scored. This sequence is then rendered in the traditional baseball scorecard format — the same format that's been used in ballpark scorebooks for over a century.

The scoring notation follows standard baseball scorecard conventions: the fielder numbers (1=pitcher, 2=catcher, ..., 9=right fielder), the line scores, the strikeout and walk symbols, the base paths. If you've kept a scorebook at a game, our scorecard will look familiar to you. Learn how to read a baseball scorecard →

Every game in our catalog has passed this verification process. If you find an error — a misscored play, a wrong fielder number, a missing substitution — please email us at hello@fieldandink.art. We take accuracy seriously: a scorecard that gets the game wrong is not a scorecard.

Baseball Reference — Cross-Reference

What "Hand-Lettered" Means

The scoring notation, the symbols, the play-by-play entries on every scorecard are rendered in the founder's actual handwriting — not a font, not a facsimile. The founder scored hundreds of games in development, building the system that translates Retrosheet event data into handwriting-style notation. The output is a rendering that looks like a real scorebook kept by a real human being at the game — because that's exactly the aesthetic it's trying to recreate.

We don't describe our scorecards as "original historical artifacts" or claim they were physically kept at the games. They are modern reproductions of what a scorecard would have looked like, built from the authentic historical record. The play-by-play data is real; the presentation is ours.

What We Are Not

Field & Ink is not affiliated with MLB, MLBPA, any MLB team, or any official baseball organization. We do not use any MLB logos, team marks, or licensed content. Our scorecards contain no team logos, wordmarks, or official licensed imagery. The game data is sourced from Retrosheet (public domain) and verified against Baseball Reference.

Buying a Field & Ink scorecard is buying access to a high-quality rendering of public historical game data, presented in a handwriting-style scorecard format. The value is in the craft and the presentation, not in any licensing relationship.