In Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair

Visits: 46

“In Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair” is a new book being released this week by Bob Ryan and Bill Chuck. Here is the official PR abstract for the book:

A love letter to the game of baseball from one of America’s foremost scribes. Bob Ryan has scored every baseball game he’s attended, at every level, since the start of the 1977 season. It’s a deeply personal tradition still going strong at more than 1,400 games and counting. The tattered scorebooks he’s filled are worn from age, travel, and countless summer days, but their grids and scrawled symbols tell the stories of milestones, rivalries, rare historic achievements, and more. In Scoring Position captures the incomparable spirit of baseball, with its infinite possibilities and madcap anomalies. Ryan, alongside baseball historian and statistician Bill Chuck, has scoured his scorecard archives for the most singular events—a switch-hitter being hit by a pitch from both sides of the plate in the same game; a player batting for the cycle off four different pitchers; even back-to-back pinch-hit home runs with two outs in the 9th. Featuring some of the game’s biggest names and wildest scenarios, this is a fascinating romp through baseball history, exuding a pure zeal for this sport that fans of all teams will recognize in themselves. This volume also features reproductions of dozens of scorecards from Ryan’s collection.

All BaseballReflections.com readers can get the print edition of the book at a 25% discount through this link by using Promo Code: BASEBALL25 from today, April 10, 2022 until July 10, 2022 ONLY!

Being a Boston sports fan my while life, I am very familiar with Mr. Bob Ryan, former writer with the Boston Globe. Wikipedia knows him as “the quintessential American sportswriter” and a basketball guru. After strickly being the Boston Celtics Beat writer for the Globe, he finally stepped down from that role in 1982 only to come back after a short TV stint in 1984 until he was promoted to general sports columnist in 1989.

Not only has Mr. Ryan covered the World Series nine (9) times, but he is also a voter for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Below you will find a listing of the awards he has earned over the years & the other books he has written as well (not just on baseball and basketball).

Awards

• National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association National Sportswriter of the Year four times (2000, 2007, 2008, 2009).
• College Basketball Writers and New England Basketball Halls of Fame.
• 1996 Curt Gowdy Award from the Basketball Hall of Fame
• 2000 Associated Press “National Sportswriter of the Year”
• 2006 Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Journalism
• 2015 PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing

Books

• Wait Till I Make the Show: Baseball in the Minor Leagues (1974)
• Celtics Pride: The rebuilding of Boston’s world championship basketball team (1975)
• The Pro Game: The World of Professional Basketball (1975)
• Hondo: Celtic Man in Motion (1977) coauthored with John Havlicek
• Forty Eight Minutes (1987) with Terry Pluto
• Cousy on the Celtic Mystique (1988) coauthored with Bob Cousy
• Drive: The Story of My Life (1989) coauthored with Larry Bird
• Boston Celtics: The History, Legends, and Images of America’s Most Celebrated Team (1990)
• The Four Seasons (1997)
• The Road to the Super Bowl (1997)
• A Day of Light and Shadows (2000) Introduction only
• When Boston Won the World Series: A Chronicle of Boston’s Remarkable Victory in the First Modern World Series of 1903 (2004)
• The Best of Sport: Classic Writing from the Golden Era of Sports (2005)
• Scribe: My Life in Sports (2014) a memoir of Ryans’ life