From its original baseball use to describe a
condensed statistical record of a game that includes the performances of
both teams and all the players, box score has taken on the extended
meaning of a record of results in any area, as in the box score of an
elected political figure or corporate administrator. Similar summaries of
baseball games were printed in newspapers as early as 1853, but the term
box score isn’t recorded until the turn of the century, being so named
because these summaries were usually printed in boxed-off sections on the
sports pages of a newspaper.