YES Network's Michael Kay, Joe Girardi and Jack Curry show Newsday how they keep score during Yankees games

When Michael Kay was a kid going to Yankees games and sitting in the $1.50 seats, he used to buy the programs that came with a scorecard and a small pencil so he could keep score. Today, as the YES Network Yankees play-by-play man, Kay is still keeping score. But, in a huge nod to technology, he now uses a pen.

A lot of things in baseball are changing right before our eyes: pitch clocks and instant replay and ABS challenges and the like.

One thing that hasn’t changed: It’s still fun to keep score at a baseball game. And even though you can use a computer or iPad — Kay said he’s considering it — you really don’t have to.

“Buying that scorecard and that pencil, that was a big expense for me,” Kay told Newsday in a telephone interview. “I would save up to spring for a scorecard and the pencil because it didn't seem right unless you used the pencil that they had at the stadium.”

For Kay and the rest of the YES broadcast crew, keeping score is part of their job. It’s also an expression of their personal styles. Kay started doing it when his baseball newspaper writing career began in 1987. So that’s a lot of scorecards.

Kay says his scoring style has evolved over the years, “but not all that much . . . It started with my dad teaching me and then an older friend who was actually like kind of our quasi-baseball coach when like I was 9 or 10. He showed me different things.”

Different approaches

One true thing about scoring style is that no two people score a game exactly the same way. Very few people could glance at someone else’s scorecard and understand the shorthand developed over decades, even if they can decipher the handwriting.

Among YES analysts, David Cone uses a computer program. Joe Girardi’s scorecard is the most detailed you will ever see, which even he admits is perfect for his reputation as “The Binder.”

YES studio analyst Jack Curry said he also “was the kid who went to games and looked for the guy yelling ‘program!’ I couldn't wait to get the program for 50 cents and get the little pencil. It's always been a lifelong passion of mine. For some people, it's a work of art. For me, I don't care if it's a work of art. I care that it's something that I can use to help me be better at my job.”

Paul O’Neill, it might not surprise you, doesn’t keep score at all.

“Paul,” Kay said, “relies on me. We're essentially keeping score for him, but it's amazing his recall. He could pick sequences from the second inning when we're in the seventh inning, and he'll go, ‘Well, this guy pitched him this way at this point.’ He doesn't even have to write it down. The only thing he has in front of him is the lineup, but he's not keeping score.”

Scorecard styles run the gamut from O’Neill (lineup only) to Kay (what’s happening in the game plus important notes and stats to aid the broadcast) to Girardi (so much information that it looks more like a physics professor’s chalkboard than a baseball scorecard).

“It's informational,” Girardi said. “I think it comes down to my managerial days in a sense, things that I thought were important. I took some of this from Ken Singleton.”

Newsday asked Girardi to translate his scorecard from a Yankees game at Wrigley Field last weekend and he used his notations about Cubs star Pete Crow-Armstrong as an example of the method to his madness (or it is the other way around?).

“If you look at it,” Girardi said, “you can see PCA. Those are his credentials: two-time All-Star, Gold Glove, player of the month in June, right? So, it's the validation of the player.

“The next thing which was important to me as a manager was the 26.5 — that’s the strikeout rate; 11.6 is his walk; 48.4 is hard hit; 33.9 is ground ball.”

There’s more. Much more.

So when you hear Girardi use these notes and stats during a broadcast, it’s because they are at his fingertips, jotted on the scorecard with his own pens in the hours before a game.

“To me, the numbers tell a story,” Girardi said. “And it helps me shape the story of the game. Not that I'm using them a ton, that I'm always looking down for a number. But it shapes the story of a player that I'm talking about.”

For Curry, scoring is pretty much the same as when he was a newspaper baseball columnist. He uses a scorebook for the entire season that can hold 200 games. He has added new wrinkles, such as noting what pitch a pitcher uses to get out a batter. Since Curry is on camera talking instead of behind a laptop writing, one of the tricks of the TV trade is where to put the scorebook so you can peek at the information you need in real time.

“When we sit in the studio, we have I guess it would be called a cart on wheels,” Curry said. “You put a bottle of water in there. There's a place if you want makeup. The most important thing that I have is my scorebook because I am looking constantly at that. Even though I can go to my phone, I still use that scorebook as a security blanket.”

Keeping scorecards?

For those announcers who use paper scorecards or scorebooks, a natural question is what happens to them after a game, or a season, or decades of seasons.

Kay keeps the important ones and even has a few framed and signed (perfect games, no-hitters). The Hall of Fame once asked Kay for his scorecard, but it wasn't from a no-hitter or a Yankees World Series-clinching victory. It was from a March 29, 2025, game when the Yankees hit nine home runs against Milwaukee.

“I gladly gave it to them,” Kay quipped on social media, “assuring I will make it into the Hall without the long drive to Cooperstown.”

Girardi keeps them, just as he kept lineup cards as a manager, but admitted, “I don't know what I'll do with them . . . I'd probably put them in the stack that's in my closet right now. My clothing closet. I use one of the shelves for the stacks.”

Curry keeps them in his office — “much to my wife’s chagrin,” he said — so he can go through them when he needs to do research for a book or for his YES job.

“Old-Timers’ Day is Saturday,” Curry said. “What if I want to go back and look something up from ‘Hey, I covered the game when Mariano Rivera got his 600th save’? I can go back and find that. I have the ability to do that. I'd rather look at my scorecard than just read the box score that I could find online in 30 seconds.”