Vincent was a baseball research legend for Nationals
Ididn’t know much about David Vincent when I met him, a few hours before I was supposed to watch some National or another play a rehabilitation assignment with the Potomac Nationals in Woodbridge, Va. To be honest, most of the details of that day escape me now. The more important parts of that memory probably never will. Vincent, a legend of baseball research and official scorekeeper at Nationals home games, passed away Sunday after a long battle with stomach cancer. He was 67 years old, and I will miss him.
Vincent introduced himself to me in the P-Nats press box, where he was sitting a few hours before the P-Nats game that night. He said he’d seen me around Nationals Park, where he often served as the official scorekeeper. I’d probably heard his voice a dozen times by then, saying things like “error, shortstop,” or “that’s a hit” over the speaker in the press box. I guess I never took much notice. The daily details like that never seem to sink in, somehow.
I wondered why a pro like him, a guy who scored big league games whenever he wanted, would come all the way to Woodbridge to do the same on spare nights. I’d recently been introduced to that old clubhouse saying, “a bad day in the big leagues is better than a good day anywhere else,” and figured making it to the big leagues meant never looking back. About 10 minutes into speaking to Vincent, I realized he was just happy for a day at a baseball field, wherever it was, because every single one of them was a treasure to him.
That’s where we started — talking baseball — sitting on the dirty old desk chairs in the cramped press box so narrow that my backpack, leaning against a wall, was enough of a roadblock to stall traffic. Fortunately that day, there was no traffic, so I got to speak to Vincent at length. He told me how he had been involved in SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) for years and served on its board of directors. He explained how when the Expos moved to Washington, he suddenly had an opportunity to score big league games, and that he scored the first game at RFK Stadium, the first game at Nationals Park, Jordan Zimmermann’s no-hitter, and several others. Somehow, in the course of our wide-ranging conversation, he undersold his story.
Vincent is something of a research legend among baseball people interested in those things. He has a digital home run record on his computer, one he has meticulously maintained for years, and he would volunteer his research to writers who asked. He helped write books, and served as unparalleled source of home run data and information to anyone who needed it. He also knew more about umpiring history than anyone in the game. Often, in the Nationals Park press box, he could be seem wearing an MLB umpire’s cap, given to him by one of his many umpiring friends. Scorers work closely with the umpires, registering substitutions and calls and the like, and Vincent knew many of them personally.
I don’t know if I asked him how he started scoring games, or if he had a day job, or if he simply brought it up,