Hardball and Software Mix at Hart

For Hart High baseball fans, the burning question of how first baseman Ray Gardocki’s 2-for-4 day against Canyon affects his seasonal batting totals now can be answered faster than you can say computerized statistics.

It’s easy. After the game, fans can pay a visit to Mike Gaber, statistician extraordinaire, at his perch behind home plate. Gaber will punch a button or two on his lap-top computer and, while the team is still putting away equipment, interested parties can head home with computer printouts of the following:

An inning-by-inning report of hits, runs, errors and runners left on base.

A standard box score.

An expanded box score that details double plays, stolen bases, hit batsmen, walks, extra-base hits, balks and wild pitches.

An inning-by-inning report of every play that occurred in the game.

Up-to-the-minute seasonal statistics for each Hart player.

It is all part of a new program offered by Computer Sports International, a Seattle-based firm that created Play By Play, a baseball scoring and information system run on a computer disk. Users are able to document and chart every pitch and play in a game.

Gaber first began using the system when he accompanied the Sherman Oaks-Van Nuys team to the Babe Ruth World Series last summer in Jamestown, N.Y. Hart players Darin Tsukashima, Jason Edwards, Jay Sanford, Chris Vasquez, Lance Migita and Robby Davis were on that team.

Bob Paul, the program director for Computer Sports International, observed Gaber in the stands with a lapful of statistics and saw in him a likely candidate to try out the Play By Play system. “We saw he was manually entering all the stats and introduced him to the program,” said Paul, who teaches at El Segundo High. “He’s been doing much of the trouble-shooting for us along the way.”

Paul said Computer Sports International is negotiating with Major League Baseball to implement the Play By Play system for all 26 major league teams.