Bob Carpenter and his scorebooks

Two years ago, Bob Carpenter, the Nationals’ TV play-by-play announcer since 2006, decided that 2025 would be his last season in the booth. He said he would handle most road games and about half of the home games.  Carpenter, who started broadcasting major league games in his native St. Louis in 1984, turned 72 on March 3, 2025.

During his first year broadcasting the Cardinals, Carpenter developed his own specialized baseball scorebook, which he began marketing in 1995. Today, Bob Carpenter’s Scorebook is available online and is used by hundreds of college, major and minor league broadcasters as well as serious baseball fans.

According to its website, the scorebook includes “sections for defense, bench players and bullpen pitchers. Umpires are positioned on the field… Team records across the top of the page help broadcasters track a team’s win-loss record, plus records for home, away and versus teams in every division and interleague play, and recently-added is a mini-scoreboard at the top of the right page.  The lineup section features large boxes for player names and stats.”

On July 5, 2024, the Washington Post featured a story by Varun Shankar about Carpenter’s practice of presenting Nationals’ players with a scorebook page of significant moments in their careers. It’s something he began doing for players on the Cardinals during his years in St. Louis.

“Obviously, whatever that first achievement was, they can probably go online on YouTube and find it,” Carpenter told Shankar.   “What I try to do is give them something that they can put their hands on and say, ‘I remember that night.’”

Shankar wrote that Luis García Jr., Jacob Young, Jake Irvin, Mitchell Parker and DJ Herz have been among the most recent recipients of Carpenter’s commemorative scoresheets from his book.

Normally, the scoresheets the players receive are games Carpenter called and scored. Just three times, he told the Post, he has completed the scoring — with all the bells and whistles he includes – after the fact for games he watched from afar: Game 4 of the 2019 N.L. championship series, Game 7 of the 2019 World Series, both handled by network announcers, and the Nationals’ July 1, 2024, game in which James Wood got his first major league hit. Carpenter had that night off, but knew the game deserved to be recorded in written form.

A Washington Nationals version of Carpenter’s scorebook for fans is identical to the regular fan book, with the exception of several Nationals references on the Scorebook Key page and the NL/AL grid pages, plus a red cover featuring the Nationals’ official logo.  The regular fan scorebook sells for $30 and can be ordered online, but the Washington scorebook is available only at the Nationals Park team store.

The scorebook web site also offers Carpenter’s tips for pursuing a career in sports broadcasting.

 In addition to two stints with the Cardinals, Carpenter worked for a decade handling a variety of sports for ESPN. He called University of Oklahoma men’s and women’s basketball games for 16 years through 2017.  He’s also done pro soccer, football, golf and tennis.

 Carpenter’s retirement timing turns out to be fortuitous, now that the contentious fight over the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network’s right to broadcast Nationals’ games ends with the 2025 season. With MASN, Carpenter has worked with half a dozen color analysts through the losing (2006 to 2011), the winning (2012 to 2019) and the losing again (2020 to 2024).

In early June 2015, a group of men in hard hats showed up at Nationals Park, declaring themselves on a banner as “Bob’s Carpenters.”

Scottt Allen of the Post featured the Carpenter fans in his D.C. Sport Bog. “It’s a great name and he’s a great announcer; we’ve got to support him,” one of them told MASN’s Dan Kolko during the second game of a double-header, Allen wrote. “Let’s go Bob!” they chanted.

  “I only had two tickets to leave,” Carpenter joked on the air, clarifying that he didn’t put his “Carpenters” up to it.

Nationals’ fans surely will miss Carpenter’s self-deprecating humor and his nonsensical home-run catch phrase: “See … you …later!” – although not as much as they liked the Nats’ home runs. Still, a successful season for the team in 2025 would be a well-deserved happy send-off for someone who will always be part of Washington baseball history.