The last six games of Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully’s television career will be on local television in LA.
Okay Southern California, it’s time for Dodgers baseball. Or, it will be soon for the large parts of the market who cannot see the Los Angeles Dodgers or legend Vin Scully on cable. Scully’s last six television games at the end of his 67-year career will be on KTLA.
Since moving the Dodgers television home from Prime Ticket to Time Warner’s SportsNet LA three years ago, most of the Los Angeles area could not see the team. The reason stems due to the cost the cable company planned to charge monthly for the Dodgers-exclusive channel. In the last year, Time Warner Cable spun off to Charter Communications, increasing the reach of the channel to nearly 40 percent of the market.
The Dodgers are in first place in the National League West and are contenders again annually for the playoffs. Scully is a living legend, a connection between Los Angeles and the Dodgers ancestral home in Brooklyn. A fixture so ingrained in Southern California, the kids that first heard him on the radio in 1958 are great-grandparents now. For all the Hall of Fame talent that has passed through Dodger Stadium, it is Scully who is the lifeblood of the team.
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Yet, because of this financial dispute, most in Los Angeles cannot watch him or the team play. The Dodgers cashed in on the recent boom in sports rights by starting their own channel. In making high demands for the value, they badly read the demand as most cable operators balked at what the team wanted to charge per month for a subscriber. For the last three seasons, the Dodgers and Scully are afterthoughts on television.
For six games, the team and the legend will grace everyone’s television airwaves again. Those last three home games and the closing weekend of the season up in San Francisco will be one last chance for a new generation of fans to see what the rest of us are talking about.
Scully will not make a fuss, he never does. Instead, he will weave an endless supply of stories through what promises to be tension-filled meaningful games. Whenever the Dodgers season ends, Scully will come out a winner. Still doing three simulcast innings on radio, chances are he will be a part of the Dodgers radio plans this October.
Those of us who pay for MLB.tv or the Extra Innings cable package have watched a Scully game this year. Partially out of nostalgia, and mostly out of the love of the game, we watch the maestro work his magic again, solo. In many ways, even outside of Southern California, Vin is our link back to childhood and why we love baseball to begin with.
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For Los Angeles and Scully, these six games are as they should be. One last week with a favorite uncle as the good guys lock up a playoff spot.