There’s now no uncertainty about Vin Scully’s last broadcast. While this season has been a long and poignant farewell to Scully and special plans have been made to broadcast his final regular-season games across Southern California, all of those plans carried the asterisk that Scully might call postseason games on radio if the Dodgers made the playoffs.
The latest
Scully said Tuesday he would not call any Dodgers playoff games on radio, meaning his career will end Oct. 2 in San Francisco.
“Otherwise, I’d be saying good-bye like in grand opera, where you say good-bye 12 different times,” Scully told The Times.
Although national broadcasters have exclusive television rights to playoff games, Scully has called the Dodgers’ postseason games on radio in recent years. The team had hoped he would do so again this year, but Scully said two farewells would be enough: Sept. 25, when the Dodgers play the Colorado Rockies in the final regular-season home game, and Oct. 2, when the Dodgers finish the regular season at AT&T Park.
On the one hand, that makes for a cleaner farewell for Scully, and it’s not the first time he’s turned down additional opportunities; he notably declined an invite from Fox to work this year’s All-Star Game.
On the other hand, it means that any Dodgers’ postseason games will be without their legendary broadcaster, and the postseason appears like a strong possibility; they’re currently four games up on the San Francisco Giants in the National League West with 19 games left to go. This exit lets Scully leave on his own terms, though, and it lets him leave against the Giants. As he told the Times, that’s a poetic ending:
He grew up in New York. As he walked home from school one afternoon, at age 8, he passed a laundry that displayed the score of that day’s World Series game: New York Yankees 18, New York Giants 4.
“As a little kid, my first thought was, oh, those poor Giants,’ Scully said. “From that little kernel, I developed a desire and a love for baseball. Since the Giants were 20 city blocks from my school and I could get there thanks to the Catholic Youth Organization and the Police Athletic League, I could go to games free, Monday through Friday. So I became a very big Giants fan.
“As things turn out, the last game of the season, and my last broadcast, will be against the Giants, in San Francisco, Oct. 2, 2016 — exactly 80 years to the day that I saw that Giant-Yankee scorecard.
“That is a fitting conclusion, I think, to my career.”
[LA Times]
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