On this Monday, Dodgers broadcasts will be forever different now that Vin Scully has retired. Vin Scully is the reason that I fell in love with baseball and it is a day that any fan eventually saw coming as he cut down the number of games that he was calling. Scully is retiring after 67 seasons as the Dodgers play-by-play caller. He was with them when they were still the Brooklyn Dodgers and moved with them to Los Angeles when baseball expanded out west. He is what every broadcaster, in baseball and outside of baseball, dreams of being. Scully makes you feel like you are sitting there in the stands at the game and is amazing at telling stories while still calling the game without missing a beat. As a teenager, if my parents were out past my bedtime (sorry mom and dad), I would stay up and move up into my dad's office, which overlooked the driveway, and would watch games until I heard them pull into the driveway and then run back to my bedroom and pretend that I had gone to bed on time. Vin is one of those once in a lifetime talents that you see in sports, but he was at the top of his “game” for decades rather than years.
One of the hardest things over the past three seasons has been a Los Angeles Dodger fan and not having Time Warner Cable. In 2013, Time Warner Cable struck a 25 year, 8.4 billion dollar television deal for broadcasting rights for every Dodger game. A majority of every game shown on other networks like ESPN and TBS are blacked out for fans to view that are a part of the Los Angeles television market. Now other television providers tried to get access for their customers, but due to Time Warner’s stubbornness at the negotiating table that deal never came. Dodgers’ fans wanted to listen to broadcasts because of Scully’s voice. For some, that meant that they would switch to Time Warner Cable, for others it meant that they would go out each night to watch the game, and for a majority would just be annoyed that they could no longer view games. The best thing that I did was moving to Arizona because it meant that I could watch about 25 Dodger games a year between ESPN and Fox Sports Arizona. Now while each of the play-by-play callers for these networks are good in their own right, none make a snoozer exciting quite like Vin Scully. For each of ESPN and Fox Sports Arizona’s final games with Vin Scully calling the games, they simulcast the Los Angeles radio broadcast for an inning.
Earlier this season, Vin broke the hearts of fans not once, but twice. He was given the opportunity by Fox to join the broadcast team, but he turned them down. The second offer was to call the Dodgers playoff games with Fox, but again turned down the offer. I like many, was sad that Vin turned down the offers, but it was because us baseball fans are selfish and we relish the opportunity to hear the soothing voice of Vin Scully in a high intensity atmosphere. The only way that Vin comes back is if the Dodgers make it game 7 of the World Series because he knows that that will be the last Dodgers game that he will ever be asked to call, but even that isn’t for certain, so for now this is it. While no one can fault Vin Scully for retiring from calling the game of baseball, it is hard to see him go. None have been as good as Vin and none will be as good as Vin. Vin revolutionized the way play-by-play calling was done for every sport.
