Tell Us a Story, Vin (One Sixty-Two: Day 24)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Twenty-Four: Matt Kemp, Los Angeles Dodgers (via Vin Scully, Dodgers broadcasting booth)

The technological revolution of this 21st century has changed more aspects of our life than we can count. As we review and prioritize the list of ways our life has changed over the past 20 years, “access to baseball announcers from other teams” is probably No. 200,000 on that list. Nothing world-changing about it, for sure. But for some of us, it’s kinda neat.

As a child, my baseball-announcing ken was limited to the Yankees and Mets crews, as well as the men who brought me ABC’s Monday Night Baseball and NBC’s Saturday Game of the Week. Toss in Mel Allen’s voice for This Week in Baseball, and that was it.

So I didn’t hear the late Ernie Harwell calling games in Detroit, nor did I catch Harry Caray singing to the masses from Wrigley Field in Chicago. Nor did I get to hear Jack Buck and his Cardinals broadcasts, nor Bob Prince and his Pittsburgh Pirates games.

In 2010, however, the baseball fan can become much more familiar with other teams’ announcers. You can buy a package that gives you access to all of Major League Baseball’s games via the Internet or the TV. You also can listen to other teams via satellite radio. Finally, you can tune into the MLB Network, and watch as the station drops in on the live action of games for a few minutes at a time – local announcers and all.

What this means, for a baseball fan who doesn’t live in the greater Los Angeles area, is that you now have access to Vin Scully. And that is probably No. 1 on the list of most important changes that technology has brought to the world of baseball storytelling.

This year marks the 61st year that Vin Scully, now 82, has been broadcasting Dodgers games. He started in 1950, alongside the legendary Red Barber. He has told fans about the exploits of generations of Dodgers: from Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider, to Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, to Steve Garvey and Ron Cey, to Orel Hershiser and Fernando Valenzuela, to Mike Piazza and Eric Gagne, all the way to Andre Ethier and Matt Kemp.

Of course, the quantity of years is one thing; the quality of work is quite another. What makes Vin Scully the greatest baseball announcer of all time – bar none – is his ability to tell the stories behind the game. Scully knows that baseball has a certain pace to it, one best suited for conversations. That’s what fans do when they’re at a game – they talk with each other. So Scully gathers loads of anecdotes, and he fills up his three hours with storytelling.

Matt Kemp, therefore, becomes much more than a name in a box score. The Dodgers centerfielder and budding superstar is a human being to Vin Scully, not a fantasy-baseball stud. Scully tells us the back stories that we haven’t heard about Kemp, and his mellifluous voice makes those stories sound like the most important things we’ve heard all day. As a man who grew up in the years before TV, Scully knows how to paint a picture for us, rather than leaning heavily on instant replay and high-tech graphics. Scully knows that all of us love to hear a good story, no matter what our age.

So we close our eyes, listen to that golden voice, and see so much more of Matt Kemp than any camera can give us. For 61 years, Vin Scully has been giving us this pleasure. He is a national treasure, without a doubt. And the only proper way to thank him is, of course, to keep listening.