There are fews sounds that mean baseball has begun, batter up and Vin Scully's voice.There were fewer things more beautiful in Los Angeles than sitting in Dodger Stadium at twilight, with its perfect green grass and red clay infield, its varied colored seats, the palm trees beyond the fences and the chaparral on the surrounding hills. Then the players start warming up on the field in the whitest uniforms possible and out of someone's nearby 'transistor' radio comes the sound of Vin Scully's great, distinctive voice. It was as much part of the team as the pitcher and catcher. Everything, then, and only then, was right with the world. m/r
The American Spectator : A True Gent Returns
Angelinos can “pull up a chair” for at least one more summer.
Those looking for good news by reading the morning paper or cruising the Internet must be focused and not easily discouraged. It’s no job for the feckless among us. But news last week that Vin Scully plans to return in 2014 for his 65th year of broadcasting Dodgers games (first of the Brooklyn then the Los Angeles kind) qualifies as good, maybe even great news.
This boon will most benefit Angelinos, who will once again have Vin’s soothing voice to perfume Southern California nights and turn accounts of baseball games into poetry and the pleasure they are meant to be. But the rest of the country can be happy that an articulate, unhurried, and thoroughly civil story-teller can still command air time in our noisy, quick-cut, almost manic age. An age with an attention span about as long as a recruit’s hair on the first day of basic training can still relish Vin Scully’s narrative slow-food.
Vin, who started broadcasting Brooklyn Dodgers games in 1950 as Red Barber’s protégé, is considered by most to be the best baseball announcer ever, perhaps the best sports announcer ever. (I fully expect to hear from the Ernie Harwell and Mel Allen fan clubs on this one, and perhaps from the odd Harry Caray enthusiast. But this is the way I see it.)
Vin has had some minor truck with tennis, golf, and football, but he’s a baseball and a Dodgers man. It’s at least partly because of the current success of the Dodgers — who after a slow start are at last living up to their gaudy payroll and hold an almost cruise-control lead in the NL West — that Vin plans to return for yet another season when he will be 86 years old. Those listening to Vin this year, but unaware of his long and remarkable history, might never guess that the Old Red Head is so seasoned. The voice is still young, even if the man behind it no longer is.
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