I was in my twenties the first time I saw someone keep score at a baseball game.

Two seats away from me, my friend Carl was using a strange set of hieroglyphics to mark each play on a scorecard in front of him. Dots, backward Ks, number-dash combinations—he wrote it all down and waited for it to speak back to him, to tell him the story of the game. I'd never seen anyone do this before Carl—or, not that I remember—and I wanted in.