The box score of a baseball game is filled with all kinds of shorthand, which is necessitated by the desire for a concise encapsulation of the contest and by the constraints of print space, since box scores were found only in newspapers for the first century of their existence. As a result, baseball fans are familiar with the common abbreviations of the box score, such as E (error), HR (home run), DP (double play), and SB (stolen base). All of those have fairly obvious origins, but what about K, which stands for strikeout?
The use of K has arguably transcended the box score to a greater degree than any other shorthand notation. The letter is often chanted by fans in a stadium when an opponent has two strikes, and placards with K on them are frequently displayed around a stadium to count how many strikeouts the home team’s pitcher has tallied. However, most of these fans are likely not aware that the catchy abbreviation they’re using owes its origin to a 19th-century Englishman who simply ran out of letters.
That man, Henry Chadwick, was a writer who had transferred his love of cricket to baseball when he saw the new game played in 1856. While working as a baseball reporter, Chadwick created many of the now-common features of baseball scoring and statistics keeping, including the numbers used to denote defensive positions (1 for pitcher, 2 for catcher, etc.). He had already chosen S to stand for sacrifice in a box score, so he used K for a strikeout, since that is the last letter in “struck,” which was at the time the most popular way to refer to a batter’s being out after three strikes. (A backwards K has come to indicate that a batter struck out without swinging at the third strike.) Chadwick’s box score of an 1859 game has been recognized as the first box score ever (although there are a number of sources that dispute this claim), and his choices made in it have reverberated throughout baseball history. His impact on how we describe the game was so great that Chadwick became the only journalist officially enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.