Baseball’s Best Announcer Retires

              The end of a baseball season always comes with a tinge of sadness for a dedicated fan like me.  Partly, that emotion is akin to what you might feel when the warmth of summer gives way to the coolness of autumn, with the darkness of winter to follow.  We, the true fans of the game, know that much will be missing from our lives until the games resume in the spring, things like the joy of reading the morning sports section with its accounts of the previous day’s games (and, if your local paper hasn’t gone cheap and stopped publishing them, the previous day’s box scores) and the thrill of a race to the playoffs and the World Series.

              But the end of this baseball season included an added element of sorrow, especially for fans of the Dodgers, because it marked the end of Vin Scully’s sixty-seven year run as the team’s primary broadcaster.  If you are unfamiliar with Vin Scully, you have my sympathy, as that not only means you are not a fan of baseball, but that you have missed out on having a relationship with the game that no one else will ever be able to provide you.

              I was seven years old when I discovered Scully.  He had just taken over the role of the primary Dodgers announcer in 1954 (Red Barber having left the Dodgers at the end of the ’53 season), which was the first year I started listening to the games on the radio and watching them on TV.  Radio station WMGM carried every Dodger game, all 154 of them.  And on TV, WOR (Channel 9) aired many of them. 

              I spent hours listening to or watching the Dodgers, who had by then become my team.  I loved listening to Scully, who was the best of the Dodgers’ three announcers; indeed, he was the best of all the city’s announcers (including Mel Allen of the Yankees and Russ Hodges of the Giants, titans of their day as well). 

              Scully, even at the age of 26, which he would have been then, understood the nuances of the game and understood how to communicate them to an impressionable young kid like me.  He could describe how Jackie Robinson would taunt a pitcher by threatening to steal home so that I didn’t need to see the play to know what was happening.  And as he was describing the scene on the field, he’d also relate how Robinson had been a track star at UCLA and how he was a pioneer on and off the field.  (At the time, young and naïve as I was, I didn’t understand that last reference; Scully never referred directly to Robinson’s skin color.)

              Scully, more than anyone or anything else, turned me from a fan of the team to a lover of the sport.  He made sense of it for me.  He imbued me with the passion that I have felt for it ever since. 

              And then, at the end of the 1957 season, my whole life was upset when the Dodgers announced that they were moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.  My first thought was that I was losing Vin Scully; that’s how tight my bond with him was.  In fact, when I moved to Los Angeles in 1975, one of my reasons was to be able to hear Scully’s broadcasts again. 

              And, of course, hearing him every day, as I had as a kid, rekindled my love of the Dodgers, who have been my team ever since.  (I’d never given up on them, but following them from afar, back in the pre-ESPN, pre-Internet days had been no small task, especially with many of their west-coast night games lasting well past midnight, so that even finding out if they had won the next day was sometimes impossible.)

              Several points regarding Scully’s broadcasting of Dodger games are noteworthy.  First of all, Vin was not a “homer.”  He never cheered for the Dodgers.  In fact, he called the games as if his audience was a mix of fans of both teams and fans of neither team.  The only way you could know that he identified with the Dodgers was that he was more familiar with the players on the team (since he traveled with them and saw them regularly at home games).  Scully called ball games like a true reporter.  He told us what had happened without injecting his personal feelings into his descriptions.  No other home team announcer has that view of the job. 

              The second point is that Scully always worked alone.  He never had a “color commentator” filling air time with on-field observations.  Scully did it all himself, and I, for one, never missed that second voice in the booth.

              And Scully wasn’t one for statistics.  The numbers weren’t a big deal to him.  In fact, he never gave exact earned run averages (the batting average equivalent for pitchers).  He’d just round them off.  To him, dwelling on statistics was the best way to lose the beauty of the game.  Instead, a typical Scully broadcast would include some home town history about each player and a vivid description of what was happening on the field.

              Over the last month or so, many stories have focused on Scully’s greatest calls, and he has had some good ones.  But so have most veteran broadcasters of the games.  For me, the best Scully moments were when he would seamlessly weave a couplet from a Shakespeare play or a Robert Frost poem into a play-by-play description.  Or when he would simultaneously announce the action in two games (the one on the field and the one he was monitoring in a close pennant race).  He was doing that on his last home game last week when the Dodgers clinched the Western Division while the Giants were trying to keep their hopes alive in a game in San Diego.  The Dodgers won that game, just as the Giants were losing theirs.  And, as he announced each pitch in both games, even at the age of 88, he didn’t miss a beat.

              But what I, and many, many others, will miss most is the relationship we all feel we had with Vin.  Yes, I only met him once, and he would have no memory of the occasion, but it is a day I will never forget, among the most cherished of the memories my seventy years of life have given me. 

              Scully formed a bond with his listeners, a bond that transcended the love of the Dodgers or of baseball.  It was a bond that best friends have for each other, that a son and a father can have, that one can feel with a political leader or a prominent entertainer.  Those kinds of bonds are part of what makes life very special.  And it’s what Scully gave to so many of us.

              Ah, Vinny, I’m going to miss you.