I was watching the Dodger game last night. I was about 10 minutes or so behind, and I had gotten up to do some dishes, so I couldn't hear the announcers. At one point, I turned off the water and heard Joe Davis say something about "the memory of Vin" (or something like that). I made a bee-line for the TV and saw the graphic they had put up in the corner of the screen: Vin Scully- 1927-2022. I immediately rewound to the initial announcement. I basically watched the rest of the game in stunned silence with tears streaming down my face.
Although he's been retired for nearly six years, Vin Scully had been a very real and tangible part of my life as long as I can remember. My father was born in Brooklyn in 1921, and his father was also born in Brooklyn in 1880. Between the two of them, they saw the Dodgers (even before they were the Dodgers) play at ever venue they called home. According to my brother (who was 6 at the time), my father came perilously close to putting his foot through the TV when Bobby Thompson hit his homer in the 1951 NL tiebreaker series.
The details of this are a bit fuzzy because most of my immediate family members are gone, but sometime towards the end of the 1950s, my father decided to move our family from New York to southern California. I wasn't yet around, but all of my siblings were born in New York. They moved out here and then moved back and moved out here a second time. As I understand it, this craziness happened within a span of 5-6 years. The family story/joke is that my father moved the family in order to follow the Dodgers.
I came along in 1967, and my father died shortly after I turned 7 in 1974. Nearly every memory I have of him relates to baseball -- him buying me my first glove and bat and the final one: watching the Dodgers in the 1974 World Series. While I don't really remember anything about the Series (other than what I've read in more recent years), I have a very distinct memory of sitting in the room with my father watching the game. I was almost literally born to be a Dodgers fan and "bleed Blue."
Because I was so young when my father died, Vin Scully became something of a surrogate. I had a clock radio in my room and would turn on Dodger games and listen to Vin (along with Jerry Doggett) teach me about baseball. It seems weird to write it, but Dodger fans developed an almost familial bond with Vin Scully and, to me, he was a sort of surrogate father. Anyone who listened to enough of Vin's broadcasts knows that talked about far more than baseball. He told stories and made the past seem present. He taught generations to be good humans.
Although Vin is synonymous with the Dodgers, he was, for several years, one of CBS's lead football play-by-play commentators, working with folks like Paul Hornung, Jim Brown and John Madden. He called "The Catch" by Dwight Clark in the 1982 NFC Championship Game. He also called tennis and golf. He called countless national baseball broadcasts, including more than two dozen World Series (covering a span of over 40 years) and many more championship series and all-star games. He remains the youngest person to have called a World Series -- he was 25 when he called the 1953 World Series for NBC television.
Deaths of folks I don't know personally have never hit me hard. Chris Squire and Neil Peart were tough, but Vin is something else entirely, and I think it's going to take a few days for me to move past this.
Wow that’s a huge loss. He called games managed by Connie Mack who was born during the Lincoln administration.
Although I've seen the same comment published elsewhere, it's not quite accurate. Mack's last season as manager - 1950 - was also Vin's first season calling games for the Dodgers. However, Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics and, since the Dodgers were in the National League and the Athletics in the American League, Vin wouldn't have had occasion to call a game managed by Mack. That said, the fact that a guy who died yesterday had a career that overlapped a guy born when Lincoln was president is just crazy!
Topic: 2022 MLB Thread formerly the 2021 thread.. (Read 72396 times)
