Editing Official scorer (section)

===Newspaper reaction===
[[File:Jerry Adair 1963.jpg|thumb|right|upright=.5|[[Jerry Adair]]]]
A player's baseball statistics can increase or reduce the leverage which he may have in future contract negotiations. Many players also have monetary incentives written in their contracts which are based on statistical measurements, and official scorers have the option to reverse a scoring decision within 24 hours of the conclusion of a game. Because of this, baseball writer-scorers were often subject to pressure from the players they were covering in their newspaper.<ref name="MLBstory" /> After a game in 1962, infielder [[Jerry Adair]] asked for a meeting with local writer Neal Eskridge after learning that he was the scorer for the game. Angry about an error he had received in the game, Jerry "cursed [Neal] thoroughly and imaginatively, and told him, 'Never talk to me again.{{' "}} They reportedly did not speak to each other for almost four years.<ref name="SI1968" /> In the early days of baseball, a disagreement over a scoring decision occasionally led to physical altercations between the player and the writer. Confrontational incidents decreased after 1974 following a warning from MLB.<ref name="SI1978" />

The pressure and the perceived conflict of interest faced by the baseball writers who scored games for MLB eventually led many major newspapers to end the practice for their employees. In 1958, ''[[The Washington Post]]'' prohibited their writers from scoring baseball games.<ref name="SI1978" /> Over the next two decades other major newspapers joined in the writer-scorer ban, including ''[[The New York Times]]'', the ''[[Los Angeles Times]]'', ''[[The Boston Globe]]'', and the major daily newspapers published in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.<ref name="SI1978" /> In 1980, MLB resolved the conflict by directly hiring official scorers for each stadium.<ref name="MLBstory" />