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

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.

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.