It ought to be at least an outright misdemeanor cited in the official Scrabble Rule Book to overlook a nascent lead-off Scrabble bingo on your Scrabble rack.Instead, make the most of your golden opportunities to draw the lead-off Scrabble tiles from the bursting Scrabble bag.

Use this multiple-volume encyclopedia to avoid mishandling your singular chances to lead off with a Scrabble bingo and with it a fifty-point Scrabble bonus.

Use this handy book series to avoid unforced Scrabble errors right off the bat.

The great Ricky Henderson holds the Major League Baseball record for most career lead-off home runs.

No one ever has nor likely ever will come within a proverbial mile of Ricky Henderson's signature baseball statistic.

When prodded Ricky Henderson no doubt can reminisce each of his eighty-one such freakish feats from soup to nuts: the stadium ambiance, for example, the pitcher, the pitch itself, and even the crack of the ball caroming off the bat.

In my own humble way I can vividly recall not only my own few-and-far-between lead-off homers on the sandlot.

I can similarly rehearse my Scrabble highlights going back a long, long way to boyhood.

I can will myself to conjure pleasant images of my much more numerous leadoff bingos on the Scrabble board.

I treasure my lead-off bingos every bit as much as I fondly recall my lead-off homers.

The American game of baseball is living chess personified by athletes and performed on a baseball field.

Classic chess and American chess are alike as managerial duels, and only their respective game pieces and settings set them apart.

Chess kings, queens, rooks, bishops, knights, and pawns are inanimate commodities which execute perfectly, and the chessboard is flawlessly flat.

The better chess strategy always wins or draws.

Classic chess is equitable, and the same goes for Scrabble.

Baseball pitchers, batters, fielders, runners, and umpires are brain and brawn, and bad hops and similar environmental anomalies also abound.

The better baseball strategy is often thwarted.

American chess can be unfair in the short term, but absent injuries the baseball season is long enough to offset good or bad luck.

My association of baseball with chess - and with Scrabble too! - is rooted in a personal history of remote rooting for the New York Baseball Giants.

Hearts broke in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut when the Brooklyn Dodgers skulked off to Los Angeles and the New York Giants slinked away to San Francisco.

That day of infamy seems like only yesterday.

Many original Giants fans and die-hard Dodgers fans still pine for their lost teams and still miss the rivalry.

True believers await the repatriation of the Giants and the Dodgers to New York City - where the two teams rightfully belong!

Until the expansion New York Mets came along to provide a sort of ersatz National League baseball, radio re-creations of the games played by the Giants and the Dodgers, in-studio, off a news ticker, pinch-hit as National League alternatives to the American League games of the steadfast New York Yankees.

So did the textual digests, of the at-bats of the Giants and Dodgers, in New York tabloids, help to fill the void until these features were edited out of the newspapers.

The Giants and the Dodgers were dumped to pump the Mets.

Remote rooting for the baseball Giants taught me to appreciate a good baseball game no matter how long after the game was actually played, and despite the intrinsic difficulties of parsing, visualizing, and assimilating the dusty, old scorecard information.

Chess notations and textual re-creations of grandmaster chess classics are old hat.

If you read Scrabble Lead-Off-Bingo Racks carefully you will find elements of a nascent "textual Scrabble notation" for rehashing classic Scrabble games.See also the Scrabble Practice book series.