Los Angeles Dodgers: Broadcast legend Vin Scully hopes MLB starts, panics stop

Scully’s message on coping with coronavirus offers comfort. He won’t watch old games until whenever Opening Day comes, either.

Even through the telephone, as Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke recorded and shared, the voice remains sonorous and the man’s gentle spirit remains intact. Now Vin Scully, the longtime voice of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, if not baseball itself, offers comfort when asked about baseball’s absence during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’m like everybody else,” Scully told Plaschke Sunday. “I’m just hoping and praying that there’ll be some good news and we’ll be able to have a good season. We’re not going to have a full season, because this thing is burning up days like an express train, but somewhere along the line I hope and pray that baseball will startup. That will be so wonderful, that will be a rainbow after the storm that, yeah, things are going to get better.”

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Scully’s final season at the microphone for the Dodgers was four years ago. “If I were still working,” he continued, “I would be terribly frustrated. But you can’t fight it. It’s too big. So everybody goes home and just waits.”

Including, he went on to mention, twenty Venezuelan players in the San Francisco Giants’ camp who can’t return to their home country because they may not be able to get back into the United States right away.

Scully was brought to the Dodgers broadcast team originally by elder legend Red Barber on April 1, 1950. On that date, a future Supreme Court justice (Samuel Alito) was born in New Jersey, Milton Berle was number one on television, Jack Benny was radio’s king (out-rated only by the anthology series Lux Radio Theater), the inventor of the blood bank (Charles Drew, surgeon) died, and Dem Bums prepared to break spring camp and launch a season.

God and His servant Barber only know how many people wish the current crisis would prove to be just another elaborate (if somewhat grotesque) April Fool’s joke.