On Saturday, May 18, 1912, an 18-year-old Philadelphian named William Charles Leinhauser played center field for the Tigers against the world champion A's. The young man's only major league performance gamed him two forms of immortality. First, he stood in for Ty Cobb. Second, Arthur (Bugs) Baer did a piece of fiction mentioning the game's box score.

"The fellow who got the toughest break was the semipro picked to play Ty Cobb's sPot," Baer wrote. "His monicker was too wide for the printers and it came out in the Sunday papers this way, `L'n'h's'r.' Today nobody knows whether his name was Loopenhouser or Lagenhassinger and I bet his wife still calls him a liar when he says he once played on the Detroits."

That's because Baer believed a baseball box score to be God's honest math.

Was then, still is.

The Tigers-A's box score of that May 18 game tells us about a dozen scrubs who worked in Detroit uniforms after Cobb was suspended for attacking a fan. We learn the first baseman was 41 years old, the catcher 46, the pitcher a seminary student, the game a 24-2 farce.

Eighty-nine years later, on May 18, 2001, box scores have evolved so brilliantly as troth-tellers that USA Today's little masterpieces rise to Hemingway's standard of good writing; they give us drama even as they tell "how the weather was." Cheek the last agate lines of the box from the previous day's Diamondbacks-Reds game: "Weather: 83 degrees, cloudy. Wind: 5 mph, left to right." (Hmmm, and that day the lefthanded hitting Luis Gonzalez hammered home runs No. 19 and 20.)

So let us pause to praise baseball's box scores. They are literary miniatures. They deliver biography, adventure, history. They are written in a language of their own, a code of sorts that, once mastered, certifies the

reader as a Great American.

But now comes word that the code--with its abbreviations, acronyms, symbols and numbers--has caused harrumphing and furrowing of delicate academic brows.

Writing in a recent Editor & Publisher magazine, journalism professors Charlie Tuggle and Don Sneed contend that box scores are so arcane as to be opaque. They quote Sports Illustrated writer Steve Lopez arguing that the "box score is nearly as detailed as a Melville novel."