Fall 2014
Alumni Profiles
Keeping Score with Jordan Sprechman ’83
Sprechman started scoring for the Major League Baseball Commissioner’s office in 2000. Splitting a season’s worth of Mets and Yankees games between Howie Karpin — his co-official scorer — and part-time stringers, Sprechman juggles nights at the ballpark with his full-time job as a wealth adviser at J.P. Morgan. He also scores for the New York Jets and Columbia football and is the head of the tournament information desk at the U.S. Open tennis championships. “There’s a lot of variety in this life,” says Sprechman, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, Barbara, and dog, Brewster.
Working behind the scenes, he may not appear to have a glamorous job. But Sprechman has scored a decade of baseball history and recorded such memorable moments as Johan Santana’s no-hitter for the Mets and Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit as a Yankee.
For Sprechman, the art of scoring involves more than applying the 36 pages of the official MLB rulebook. It requires an understanding of the game’s nuances and an eagle eye. In the second it takes an infielder to bobble a grounder and allow the other team to score, the visible difference between a hit and an error blurs. A final call depends on details all the way down to the positioning of the fielder’s feet, from which Sprechman can discern the fielder’s intent and the play that should have been made. Working live, Sprechman avoids television replays as much as possible. “We don’t want to rely on replay because you lose the spatial relationship. In slow mo, everything looks like a hit,” he says.
Sprechman has had a passion for the stats side of sports for as long as he can remember. He insists, however, that he wouldn’t be in his scoring seat without the late Bill Shannon. Shannon scored and covered
Lions football as a stringer for the Associated Press while Sprechman attended the College, and in 1979 he became an official scorer for the American League and later the official scorer for MLB in New York City.
In 1990, when AP relied on freelance stringers rather than staffers to cover games, Shannon was swamped. Sprechman offered a helping hand with the reporting and after a time asked about becoming a scorer. “And after [Bill gave me] the usual and obligatory, ‘You’ve got to be out of your mind, we get paid 110 bucks a game, 10 bucks after scoring the game, 100 bucks to put up with all the guff,’ I said ‘OK’ anyway,” Sprechman says.
Shannon insisted that to become a scorer, one had to watch a lot of baseball. So Sprechman shadowed him — for 10 years — and in 2000, after Shannon lobbied for an expanded scoring team, Sprechman was offered a position. After passing an exam, he officially scored his first game that same year.
All of this isn’t to say that Sprechman jumped into the press box without any experience. He started scoring for Horace Mann while in high school there, and also snuck into Columbia basketball games — abetted by his friend Josh Ehrlich ’77, who was on the JV basketball scoring crew — to do minutes played for the Lions. Once at the College, Sprechman expanded his reach. As a sports writer for Spectator, he covered everything from women’s volleyball to wrestling and of course, baseball. He also wrote for the Columbia Sports Information Office’s newsletter, Lines on Lions; called soccer, basketball and football games for WKCR; and broadcast with Columbia TV alongside Ronald Blum ’83, now a sports writer for AP.
For Sprechman and his friends, including Blum, Edward Barbini ’83 and David Newman ’83, reporting on and scoring for Columbia athletics was about “getting the players’ stories out and learning” says Blum. “We were just doing what we were doing and having fun doing it.”
Despite his involvement with Columbia sports, Sprechman always intended to go to law school. He majored in history and after earning a J.D. worked at various firms before joining J.P. Morgan (then Chemical Bank) in 1993. While the prospect of a sports career tempted him, he feared that working in the business “would have stripped away the intrigue and the romance and the fun of sports.”
A highlight of his scoring tenure came on July 9, 2011, when the Yankees played the Tampa Bay Rays at home. Jeter was one away from the statistical milestone of 3,000 hits. “Any scorer will tell you that no matter the outcome, they wanted it to be a clean hit,” says Sprechman. Any ambiguity in the call might spur controversy. During Jeter’s next at bat, the shortstop worked the count full as the crowd’s anticipation and excitement grew. When Jeter blasted a home run deep to left field, Sprechman sighed in relief.
For Sprechman, the beauty of statistics is the unique way in which they tell the story of the game. “One of the things that appeals to people about sports is the ability to compare what’s happened across generations,” he says.
Reflecting on his role in America’s greatest pastime, Sprechman adds, “A large part of human endeavor is trying to make sense of what’s otherwise a chaotic universe. Being able to be part of what creates that basis of comparison and what stitches together the continuity is humbling.”
Karl Daum ’15