Somewhere in the attic, among all the boxes of baseball material, are a stack of scorecards and programs I’ve used over the years. The first one was from a Mets-Pirates game in 1966. It has the unsophisticated scrawls you’d expect from a nine-year-old who hadn’t yet learned the “right way” to record what was going on. It was just an ordinary game — nothing historic or exciting to report — but it was the first and a pleasant a memory.
That’s the premise behind In Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair, by Bob Ryan and Bill Chuck.
A veteran writer in his own right, Chuck’s work on the book struck me as that of the color person in the broadcast booth: Ryan, an ESPN TV personality and long-time scribe for the Boston Globe, provided the play-by-play based on his score book while Chuck fleshed out the games with anecdotes and stats to make it more approachable to the reader.
I rarely have co-authors on as guests, but many times these are the people who do the heavy lifting, who turn a “project” into a “book” and Chuck offers some interesting insight into the collaborative process.
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