Why strikeouts k

So, why do they use the letter K for a strikeout? But, how long has this been around? Baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in , but the box score was not invented until by Henry Chadwick. That means for roughly twenty years, baseball did not have any type of official scoring system for each play.

Because there was no television and no photography, the best way for regular fans to follow what happened in the game was to get a play-by-play breakdown via the box score. In order to be as precise and accurate as possible, Henry Chadwick resorted to using letters to symbolize what had happened during any particular play. So he had to come up with something else to indicate if the play resulted in a strikeout.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the originator of the abbreviation was the forefather of the modern sportswriter, Henry Chadwick. The British-born, Brooklyn-based writer for the Long Island Star and The New York Clipper in the midth century is credited with the invention of the box score , one of his many contributions to the game that earned him posthumous election into the Hall of Fame.

Baseball in America developed before television, radio, or even widespread photography, which made newspaper reports of the game crucial to the spread of the sport's popularity. Baseball has an intricate scoring system in which the scorekeeper assigns every position a number.

Each action in a baseball game — outs, hits, substitutions, etc. The results are recorded in a box score. While each stadium has an official scorekeeper, baseball broadcasters often keep score of the game in order to keep track of what happens. Fans in the stands will sometimes keep score for fun. Strikeouts are recorded with a K.