“But It Could Have”

I am pure Southern California, born in Los Angeles, one of the few.  Almost everyone else moved here from Iowa or New England.  They watched the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day with a stadium full of people in the sun, and promptly shoveled the snow off their driveways and headed west.  I can hardly blame them. If the temperature dips below 70 degrees, it is too chilly for me.

Southern California is fair weather and walking on the beach and shirtsleeves in December.  It is a way of life, a feeling, an attitude. It is home.  And one of the best things about living in the civilization of Los Angeles has been the constant, comforting and dulcet baritone of Vincent Edward Scully. He was the voice of the Dodgers from 1950 to 2016.     

From the time they uprooted from Brooklyn in 1958 and became the L.A. Dodgers, blue has been my signature color, and Scully’s voice has been the soundtrack of my life. Vinny has kept me company driving around.  He has lullabied me to sleep on balmy summer evenings.  And like many other Dodger faithful, when I came to the ballpark to watch the game and eat a Dodger dog and wait for that guy to throw me a bag of peanuts, I had my portable radio in my hand and Vinny in my ear.        

People often criticize baseball for being too slow, too drawn out.  It has been described as three hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of athletic ecstasy.  Yet therein lies the genius of Scully.  He has filled the spaces with his knowledge of the game and its rule book and its lore. 

After sixty-seven years in the broadcast booth he finally stepped down, and I really miss him.  I am one among millions who feel the same.  There was something about his approach that made us feel that we were one-on-one, just the two of us talking baseball. 

I miss the way he turned a phrase.

It’s time for Dodger baseball.

He’s comin’ in a hurry.

He’s going back, way back, to the track, to the wall, IT’S GONE!

Trying to sneak a fastball by Sheffield is like trying to sneak a pork chop by a wolf.     

The pitch is way inside — a little chin music.

And for those of you in the Sandy Koufax marching and chowder society…

I miss the way he used language, just the way we were taught in grade school.  His inflections rose on the questions and fell on the declaratives.  He paused just the right amount of time for us to catch up.  You could hear the punctuation.

I miss the way he respected the listeners.  He never talked down; he gave us credit.  He could quote literature to keep the fans alert, without turning them off.  Who else among sportscasters could cite Homer and get away with it?  When the Dodger starter got shelled and the manager pulled him in the second inning, Scully quipped that “…they carried him off on his shield.”

I miss his narrative of the plays within the play, the games within the game.  The duel between pitcher and batter.  The tension as the pitcher carried a no-hitter going in the late innings. Scully turning to the drama in the stands — the emotion on the face of the pitcher’s wife — a nice touch.  The chess match as the opposing managers attempted to look three and four and five moves ahead.  I have long suspected that Tommy Lasorda had his own transistor radio in the dugout, and that he listened to Scully’s analysis before making any moves; because the smartest guy in the room was the guy with best seat in the house, high above it all.

And how is it that Scully came to be so excellent and so highly regarded?  He never phoned it in.  In addition to his skill set and his finely developed craft, his homework and his preparedness were legendary.  And nowhere was his homework more in evidence than in his storytelling. 

That is what I miss most of all – his storytelling.  No one did it better.  It was uncanny the way he could shape a story within the play-by-play without missing a beat or a ball or a strike.  Occasionally a story took a little longer, and it was smoothly carried over to the next inning.  And the stories were always about the players and the game itself, and not about him.  Never about him. 

He had a trove of riches from all those years in the booth, but he also searched out current information about Dodger players and visiting team members and their families and their hometowns.  One of my favorite stories is about a baseball that was handed down from a ball player to his son, and then from the son to the grandson.

Scully was calling a game in which one of the visiting players was that very grandson.  It was amazing that three generations of the same family had made it to the BIGS.   It was equally amazing that Scully had called games in which the son, the father and the grandfather had each appeared! Only someone behind the microphone for more than six decades could honestly give an account of the arc of a baseball that spanned more than half a century.  Scully caressed the story of the souvenir baseball from a moment in the grandfather’s playing days, and how it became a family treasure and a symbol of the enduring power and tradition of baseball.

When he finished the story, eyes were being blotted and the inning was over.  When he returned, he made a statement which gives comfort to story tellers everywhere.  It is quoted here as accurately as I can remember:   

That story about the baseball might not have happened exactly as I told it, but it could have.  

I miss Vin Scully’s humanity.  I miss his humility.  I miss his sense of humor. 

Dodger baseball hasn’t been the same without their all-time MVP.