It may come as a surprise, but Bob Ryan’s greatest sports love was (and remains) baseball, not basketball.
“Baseball, and I believe this, is the best game,” Ryan asserted in a recent interview.
The longtime sportswriter — who formally retired as a Boston Globe columnist in 2012 but remains very active — is known for decades of Celtics coverage. He began on the Celtics beat in 1969 and has written seven books about basketball.
Yet it was actually Ryan’s singular year on the Red Sox beat that launched a personal tradition that’s now become his 15th book, the newly-released “In Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair.