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Stylish blogger Joe Posnanski came to town and spent a little time with Vin Scully at the stadium, and more time listening on the radio as he rode around Los Angeles, and spins out a nice piece exploring the origins and meaning of L.A. culture's most enduring relationship. It's hard even to decide which little snippets to tease, there are so many flavorful insights and turns of phrase. Here's one excerpt from Posnanski's story, which appears on his SI blog with the inviting title of Curiously Long Posts. He talks about how Scully arrived in L.A. in 1958 hearing life in the rhythms of his native New York, and struggled (as many do) to find the essence of Los Angeles.
“I really had trouble with that for a while,” he says, and he is about to say something else, but he stops because people keep coming over to say hello. Here’s a Dodgers employee who has been gone for a while (“You look beautiful, my dear.”) There’s Tommy Lasorda (“Vinny, my boy!”). There’s the young woman who works in the press dining room bringing him coffee (“You are an angel.”)“Like I was saying, I really had trouble with that for a while,” he says when things clear. “I didn’t quite know what the city was about. It took me a while to figure it out.”
“What did you finally figure out?”
As he is about to answer, two more people wander in to offer hugs. They apologize profusely for interrupting, but they cannot help it, they cannot let an opportunity like this go by. Vin Scully! He has been a Los Angeles icon now for more than 50 years. There are not many of the great baseball voices left, not from the old days. Ernie Harwell up in Detroit — Vin’s buddy for almost 60 years — died in May. Philadelphia’s Harry Kalas died a year ago April. Jack Buck’s gone, Mel Allen’s gone, Bob Murphy, Joe Nuxhall, Herb Carneal, Jack Brickhouse, Herb Score, all gone.
Vin Scully, who broadcast his first baseball game in 1950, is still going.
When they walk off, Scully smiles and says: “What were we talking about again?”
I also like this reflection on Scully's description of the crowd noise coming through the radio engulfing a listener "like water out of a shower head."
Like water out of a shower head. No announcer in the history of sports has used crowd noise more musically than Scully. Can it be a coincidence? Sinatra used to say that his musical instrument was not his voice, it was the microphone. Scully uses crowd noise as his orchestra. When Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run, Scully was there, and he called the home run, and then he took off his headset, walked to the back of the room, and let people listen to the crowd cheer. Like water out of a shower head. “What could I have said that would have told the story any better?” he asks. And he pauses: “You know what? I still love listening to the sound of a crowd cheering. Don’t you? Don’t you just love that sound?”