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.
Legendary Los Angeles Dodgers Broadcaster’s Message of Hope
A spring without baseball, never mind a season, “leaves a huge hole in your life,” said Scully, who grew up in New York during the Depression. (He became a Giants fan as a boy, after hearing their game broadcasts on radio on his way home from school). Unlike numerous fans now reaching to listen to or watch vintage ballgames, Scully has no wish to return to what was while missing what isn’t for now.
“I pick up the paper and, really, I don’t have much to read,” he continued. “I guess, like on TV, they’re going to start showing old games. Maybe on the baseball channels they’ll show old games, old World Series games. To be honest, I don’t watch old stuff. I’m watching the news, and that’s about it.”
The first time I went to a game at Dodger Stadium, with my then seven-year-old son (whose hero then was Shawn Green but who remains otherwise a Los Angeles Angels fan), I was astonished to see dozens of tiny portable television sets in laps, running on batteries, pictures turned off but the sound turned up the better not to miss that voice.
It was as though even the fans in the stands wouldn’t believe what they just saw on the field until or unless Scully called it, whether it was Sandy Koufax‘s perfect game, Henry Aaron hammering his way past Babe Ruth, or Alex Cora hitting a two-run homer on the eighteenth pitch of a plate appearance. Cred like that simply can’t be bought, though men and women of all stations have spent millions trying only to find they have to visit the return and refund desk.
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Scully is more aware than perhaps he’d like to be of the coronavirus’s spread and attack. He admits that when his children and grandchildren visit him and his wife, Sandra, affection that’s usually second nature is now kept at arm’s length the better to avoid the potential for infection. “The kids are scared that they’re going to bring in something that will just blow me away,” he said. “So it’s a very difficult time to go without hugs.”
For the man who thought nothing of pausing during a broadcast to see a baby asleep in a father’s arms in the seats, saying affectionately, “Hello, sunshine, sleeping the sleep of the good child,” it’s not impossible to imagine such a temporary but profound loss.
Legendary Los Angeles Dodgers Broadcaster’s Message of Hope
Scully has known profound loss in his life. His first wife died of an accidental drug overdose; his oldest son was killed in a helicopter crash. He remarried happily and thus remains; his extended family at home and in baseball fortified his appreciation for the ties that bind. And, heightened his awareness of how they’re challenged on the field, off the field, and in the middle of a viral pandemic.
“For every storm, a rainbow/for every tear, a smile/for every care, a promise/and a blessing in each trial,” reads the Irish blessing Scully offered toward the end of his final broadcast almost four years ago.
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He had no idea then how that blessing might apply now when Opening Day seems a wish far more than a coming actuality. “Opening Day, everyone is full of hope, confidence, happy,” he said Sunday. If and when it comes at last, “it’ll be like the ones in 1945, ’46, when World War II ended. What an emotion that must have been.” (Scully was a member of the Navy before going to Fordham University.) “And then, all the others, Korea, Vietnam, etcetera.
“I have no idea of what to do,” Scully continued. “I’ve never experienced it. I did have a strong taste of the Depression . . . but I didn’t have any idea that this thing, more than 2008, more than SARS (in 2003), more than any of the other epidemics, nothing has affected the country like this one.”
He thinks many people will see the coronavirus bringing them closer to their spiritual faith. “You know, they might pray a little harder, a little longer, so there might be other good things to come out of it,” he said. “Certainly, I think people are easily jumping at the opportunity to help each other. I believe that’s true. So that’s kind of heartwarming, that with all of it, it brings out some goodness in people.”
It also brought out glandular panic, unfortunately. “Panic is not going to help anybody,” Scully urged. “That’s the big risk.”
But it’s also brought out humor, running the full distance from laughing that you might not weep to the gallows kind. (There are how many toilet paper gags going, if you’ll pardon the expression, viral?) Scully is only too well aware that humor is imperative even in climates where humor is too often dismissed as childish or denounced as a criminal.
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“If you can find any humor in this world, however you want to look at it, that’s awfully important,” said the man who once kept his viewers laughing while interpreting Jim Tracy, former Los Angeles Dodgers turned Colorado Rockies manager, arguing an outfield trap call on a short, sinking fly ball:
Uh-oh. Uhhh-oh. The [umpires] meeting looks like they’re going to call it a trap, and Jim Tracy . . . [crowd noise] . . . He caught the ball, Jim says. He caught the ball. He caught the blinkin’ ball. He caught the darn ball . . . [crowd noise, as Tracy pulls his hat off and slams it to the ground two-handed] . . . oh, oh, you’re gone. Heeee’s gone . . . [crowd noise] . . . That is blinkin’ fertlizer! I’m doing the best to translate . . . you’ve gotta be blinkin’ me! . . . The ball, he caught the ball! . . . It’s unbelievable! Blinkin’ unbelievable! . . . No way! No blinkin’ way! No bloody way! Jim’s gone, so he’s spending house money now . . . [crowd noise] . . . [brief, slow-motion replay of the outfielder’s original attempted off-the-grass catch] . . . take another look, looks like it’s in the glove . . . what’s a shame, really, we have this [replay] equipment, and no one takes avail of it. I mean, they say it would slow up the game, what did that do? They could have had someone upstairs, or an umpire go and look at the tapes. Instead, big argument, the manager’s kicked out of the game, the umpires have to reverse. I’m not second guessing the reversal, they’re doing the best they think, but I’m just saying here we are, with all that equipment to show it. Want to show it again, Brad? Dustin? Take another look. How do you call it? [The play is shown again, semi-slow motion.] There’s the glove, there’s the ball, it’s in the glove, isn’t it? Didn’t it hit the webbing?
Unlike Tracy during that argument, the biggest thing for Scully now, he says, is staying calm even as only too many around and beyond him stay anything but.
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“I know that’s very easy to say,” said the man who wasn’t baseball’s Cicero when we knew Cicero was really ancient Rome’s Vin Scully, “but I’ve been reading about lines in the big stores, and the gun shops . . . That scares me, all the guns that are being sold. So the only thing, I guess, is to pray a lot and try to stay calm. Nothing else. What else can you say?”