Vin Scully is 84 years young and will be broadcasting Dodgers baseball for the 63rd season. The man is a living legend, an institution, and is still going strong. However, Father Time is undefeated, and in recent years Scully has started scaling down his schedule. At first, Scully stopped traveling to road games with the Dodgers outside of the NL West. Now, from the LA Times, comes the news that Scully will be cutting out trips to Colorado as well.
When asked about the decision Scully said, “No big, earth-shattering reason, just to cut back a little more on the traveling.” And who can blame Scully for wanting to limit his schedule to California and Arizona games? It’s not as if Scully is going to be an absentee broadcaster, he’ll still be there for well over half of the Dodgers games this season.
But, once Scully does hang up his microphone, it truly will be the end of the era. In many ways, Scully is the last of the legendary broadcasters who made the sport of baseball the American pastime. And while football may have passed by MLB, the sound of Scully’s voice is enough to reverse the course of modern sports history, if only for a few fleeting hours.
Perhaps that’s why there was such a drive by many younger fans to involve Scully in FOX’s World Series coverage this past fall. Heck, even Joe Buck and FOX offered to give up some time to Scully to take over a few innings. However, it looks as if the World Series is going to have to go to California if Scully is going to be given one last hurrah on the national stage.
Even more inspiring though, the fact that Scully showed up to Dodgers Spring Training to work off the rust of another offseason. Scully said:
“It’s as simple as this: The last baseball game I did was Sept. 28, and I thought, ‘My gosh, all these highly talented players, they have to come here and practice for a month to get ready. I want to do a couple of games just to kind of get the feel of them again. It’s batting practice for me.”
There’s a lot of high profile announcers that could take heed from Vin’s example, in many more ways than one.
[LA Times]
