Bob Ryan's got a new book -- Scribe: My Life in Sports -- and it's a good one. Among many others, I appreciated this passage:
Once I became a full-time baseball writer, keeping score became a daily necessity. The difference for me was that even after I ceased becoming a full-time baseball writer I felt some kind of inner need to keep score, whether I was in the press box or in the stands, at a major league or a minor league game or perhaps even a college or Olympics game. Scorecards can, years later, recall individual plays or oddities and historical occurrences, which a rabid fan like me will appreciate.
--snip--
I can't tell you how many times over the years I've been sitting in my seat at a ballpark other than Fenway, scorebook in hand, and someone will say, "Are you a scout or something?" Very few people keep score any more, and it's sad. My wife does. Unlike me, Elaine does not add up the totals at the game's conclusion and she never looks at her notations again. But she has her own book and it wouldn't be right for her to be at a game and not keep score. She always checks to see if the caught stealing went 2-4 or 2-6, whether the rundown was 1-6-5-6-5 or 1-6-4-6-5, or if the putout on that shit was 6-3 or 4-3. That's us, Mr. and Mrs. Scorebook.
I just wish there were more baseball in the book. Ryan was on the Red Sox beat for just one season: 1977, after which Peter Gammons returned from Sports Illustrated to The Boston Globe and reassumed his old job, and Ryan soon went back to covering the Celtics.
Ryan writes well about 1967's "Impossible Dream" Red Sox -- he was still in college then, but a huge Sox fan -- and about his season on the beat, and about more recent editions of the club. But there's also a lot of hockey and golf in the book, and a lot of hoops.
Scribe is well-written and thoughtful, and I appreciate that Ryan has remained a fan through all these years, too. But it's a book for Boston sports fans first, for NBA fans second, and baseball fans just third or fourth.
