What is backwards k in baseball

A great advertising solution to get high quality customers. Get your business to appear alongside the most relevant and popular topics. Setup simple ads in minutes. Answered Mar 3, A reverse K means the batter took the pitch looking at it, because he didn't think it was a strike, and didn't swing, while, the Home Plate Umpire called a standing Strike Three and gave him the hammer. Grab some pine and sit-down, you're out. Answered Mar 6, A backward K is used to note a batter who took a called third strike by the umpire, as opposed to a swing and miss third strike, as represented by the normal K symbol.

Baseball is full of little quirks that might not make sense at first glance. 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. The K was now widely used as a strikeout call, but there was no way to differentiate between a swinging strikeout and looking. It may not make a difference to the average fan, as a strikeout is a strikeout, but to baseball statisticians, it does. If a pitcher is so precise, it can fool the batter into not swinging.

It often means their location or off-speed pitches are top-notch. This is why the backward K was invented. As shown above, the backward K on both a box score sheet and a sign in the crowd can signify when a player strikes out looking. The backward K can be seen in ballparks all across the world.

Fans often use red or black lettering that way; everyone can see the K signs that hang on the wall. The more backward K signs on the wall, the more time the pitcher fooled the batter when striking out.