Not enough details were provided, and therefore am giving you the best answer possible after interpreting your question.
You can use a dictionary to store all the items as the key, and the number of times the user picked that item up as a value.
data = {"ball": 0, "bat": 0, "helmet":0}
answer = input("What would you like to pick up? (ball, bat, or a helmet?)")
if answer in data:
data[answer] += 1
else:
data[answer] = 1
This was a simple example, and I had pre-popualated the dictionary. In your program you will have to check if the item exists or not, and then increment like I did. Hope this helped.