Bull: Yup, that's what the rulebook says.
However, in actual practice, the Official Scorer is still usually a member of the press in the home team's city. (For example, sports writer Bob Rosenberg is the official scorer at Wrigley) There was alot of clamor several years ago for MLB to hire and train a pool of full-time official scorers; and assign them to games on a rotating basis, similar to umpires. As I remember, at the time somebody from the MLB office said that instituting such a practice would be "cost prohibitive".
That being said, let's do a little speculative math here. Assuming 30 current teams, there could be a maximum of 15 game sites per day. If we add another 5 people to account for illness and/or vacations, MLB would need a pool of @20 full-time Official Scorers. If each were to be paid a salary of $150K, that adds up to $3 million. If we add another $2 million to account for employer-paid taxes, Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, etc., that makes $5 million. Now here's where the math gets "speculative". Lets conservatively add another $10 million to account for such things as travel expenses and administrative overhead. That brings the grand total to $15 million. Now lets assume that my numbers are too low. OK, so we'll double them. That brings the total to $30 million. MLB could either absorb that cost from their vast amount of TV revenues or assess each team a fee of $1 million. That doesn't sound all that "cost prohibitive" to me.
As you can probably tell, this has been one of my pet peaves for years.
Bill
