For nearly two decades, Chris Ivy has made the one-mile trek from his house in Durham, North Carolina, to his second home at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, where where the retired social worker assumes his post in a nook in the leftfield fence and manually updates the scoreboard. Long before the first electric scoreboard was introduced in 1908, before incandescent bulbs lit up runs, balls, and hits in the mid-twentieth century, and before today’s LED boards and high-def digital screens started keeping up-to-the-millisecond stats, the difference between winning and losing was a numbered placard, hung on a board. In Durham, it still is. Ivy, seventy-seven, is in a league pretty much his own when it comes to analog scorekeeping—only two other AAA-level parks still have them, and of the majors, only Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field still maintain OG boards. We caught Ivy between innings to ask what keeps him in the game.
How did you land this job? Were you a baseball player?
I didn’t play. I wasn’t very athletic, so this position fills a lot of cups that didn’t get filled as a kid. I get to be part of a team, alongside the players and the behind-the-scenes folks in the press box, the concessions. I moved to Durham in 2008 and have always followed the Bulls, keeping score on my own. When my friend, who was more into baseball stats than I was, suggested we go to the job fair, I saw this listing and applied. The interview was pretty easy—I assured them I was familiar with the numbers one to ten. Later I asked my boss, ‘No one else applied, right?’ and he just laughed. Never answered.
What’s the best part of manning the scoreboard?
I have an incredible 180-degree vista, looking out on the field with no buildings across from me. Sunsets are amazing. It’s a very Zen thing for me. I zone in on the game, and still keep score for myself in my little score book. I also love being part of the culture. The Bulls are a big franchise, we get major leaguers down here on rehab—players on their way up and on their way down. For my seventieth birthday, I took the day off and got to sit up in the club. Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton of the Yankees were there—nice of them to come to my birthday party! I was invited to Fenway once and got to go behind the Green Monster and sign the wall.
How about the hardest part? Have you committed any errors?
Summer—the heat. It’s one hundred degrees back there. I have this big fan that’s my lifesaver, but the constant blowing dehydrates me. I fill up an ice cooler from the concession stand and wet down my T-shirt. In two innings, it’s bone dry. And yes, once I did zone out. I’d picked up a stats pamphlet from the press box, got distracted reading it before I turned on my transistor radio. I looked out and the bases were loaded. Fortunately, it wasn’t life and death.
Next season will be your twentieth with the Bulls. What keeps you going?
I love being part of the action. Once recently the Bulls were down nine to one and you figured it was over, then they scored eighteen runs without giving up another one. I don’t want to have to read that in the paper. I enjoy doing some amateur photography, too, documenting the stadium and the games from my unique perch. I had a show recently at a bar across from the ballpark. It keeps me young; I feel like I’m fifteen or sixteen, not this eccentric old man at the ballpark.
