Bottom Line Ticker: How to Read the Scrolling Crawl

October 11, 2026

A bottom line ticker is the strip of scores and news that scrolls along the bottom of a screen while you watch something else. It squeezes a whole game into a few characters, so it is easy to read once you know the shorthand: who is home, whether the game is live, the inning or the clock, and the small marks around the score. This guide goes through that shorthand piece by piece, using the strip GridTicker draws, which has a theme called "ESPN Bottom Line" and a layout that puts the whole game on one line, the way the original broadcast crawl did.

What a bottom line ticker is for

A crawl is made for a glance. You are watching one game, working, or cooking, and every so often you look down to see how everything else is going. Nothing on it stays still for long, so every game is cut down to what you need in about a second: two teams, two scores and the state of play.

That is why the abbreviations matter. If you know that "Bot 7th" means the home team is batting in the seventh, you don't have to wait for the next pass to work out what you just saw.

Reading a game on the strip

The teams and the score

On GridTicker's TV score box layout, the visitors are on top and the home team is underneath. Each team has a bar in its color next to it, or its crest when Logos is on. The team that is ahead has its score lit up, so you can see the leader without comparing numbers.

The Single line layout puts the whole game on one line instead, like the original broadcast crawl. It takes less height, which helps when the strip is a thin bar along the bottom of a TV.

Live, still to come, or final

• A red dot means the game is live. Next to it is the inning or the clock and the period.
• A start time means the game hasn't started. A game still to come shows when it starts and the channel carrying it.
• Final means it's over. Final/OT means it went to overtime.

Baseball shorthand

Baseball packs the most onto one line:

• Bot 7th is the bottom of the seventh, so the home team is batting. Top means the visitors are up.
• R H E are runs, hits and errors.
• The diamond shows runners: a filled base has a runner on it.
• The dots are outs. Filled ones have been recorded.
• 3-2 is the count, with balls first and then strikes.
• AB and P show who is at bat and who is pitching, each with their line for the game so far.
• SP, on a game still to come, is each side's probable starting pitcher, with his record and ERA.

Football shorthand

• An arrow points to the team with the ball.
• Three short bars show the timeouts each team has left.
• The down and distance and where the ball is, plus the last play in words.
• Red down and distance means the team with the ball is inside its opponent's 20, the red zone.

Hockey and basketball

These are the simplest to read: the score, the clock and the period.

College rankings

In college sports, a number in front of a team, like #2, is its place in the national rankings.

Playoff lines

In the postseason a game shows its round under the clock, such as a Division Series game number, a wild card round or a bowl. In a series it also shows where the series stands. The game that ends a series says who won it. On an LED panel the same line is cut down to fit, so the round, the game number and the series score sit together in a few characters.

Badges: when something unusual is going on

Some things get a badge of their own next to the game while they last:

• RAIN DELAY, or a suspension or postponement, keeps the inning where play stopped beside it, so you can see where it will resume.
• NO-HITTER BID shows up from the fifth inning when a team has no hits yet, and names the pitcher. PERFECT GAME BID means nobody has reached base at all. Either badge disappears as soon as a hit lands.
• Scoring celebrations give a scoring play its own moment for two minutes, with the scorer's name. That covers runs, home runs and grand slams in baseball, touchdowns and other scores in football, and goals in hockey. Basketball has none, because it scores too often for a celebration to mean anything.

Keeping up with a strip that moves

The most common complaint about any crawl is that the game you care about went by before you could read it. Some ways around that:

1. Slow it down. On GridTicker each ticker has its own speed, in pixels per second, so headlines can scroll slower than scores.
2. Pause it. Pause on hover stops the strip while your mouse is over it.
3. Put your teams first. Favorites first puts the teams you star ahead of the rest of their league. Favorites only shows nothing but those teams.
4. Trim the list. The Live, Upcoming, Final and Preseason switches decide which games are on the strip at all.

Also expect the strip to run a little behind the broadcast. GridTicker gets its scores from public sports data providers, which can lag what you see on TV.

Running a bottom line ticker on your own screen

GridTicker runs in any modern browser, with nothing to install, so it works across the bottom of a monitor, on a TV in the corner or on a spare laptop. To make it look like a broadcast crawl:

• Under Settings → General, in the Browser block, set Theme to "ESPN Bottom Line" and Layout to "Single line".
• Turn off Stack tickers in rows so everything shares one strip instead of each ticker getting its own row.
• Leave Fit text to the screen on so the text sizes itself to the window's height, whether that's a thin bar or a whole TV.

The same strip can carry your stock watchlist, headlines from the outlets you choose, and division and wild-card tables alongside the scores. The guide explains every row and setting. If you'd like a crawl of your own, you can set up a strip and start with a trial.