07 Sep Love, promise-keeping, story-telling, democracy. And baseball.

I have mentioned before that I grew up in a New York City suburb listening to then-twenty-something Vin Scully call Brooklyn Dodger baseball games on a tube radio.

Now 88, Scully is still at it—in his 67th season calling the play-by-play for Dodger home games, these days performed in Los Angeles. In a tribute published in today’s Washington Post, columnist George Will calls Scully, “the most famous and beloved person in Southern California.”

[He] is not a movie star but has the at-ease, old-shoe persona of Jimmy Stewart. With his shock of red hair and maple syrup voice, Scully seems half his 88 years.

More than the maple syrup voice, it was the rivulet of Scullian similies that captured my enduring affection. As I wrote back in 2009:

He said Bob Gibson “pitches as though he’s double-parked.” He said, “Losing feels worse than winning feels good.” He said, “Sometimes it seems like [Bobby Bonilla’s] playing underwater.” He said, “Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination.” He said, “When [Maury Wills] runs, it’s all downhill.”

While calling 1987 All-Star Game, Scully saw the Toronto Blue Jay’s uber-smooth shortstop Tony Fernandez for the first time. “He’s like a bolt of silk,” Scully said.

Later this month, or possibly in October, Scully will call his last game. He is retiring at last. Even if you don’t give a fig about baseball, as too many Nova Scotians do not, you should give Will’s loving encomium a read:

Aristotle defined human beings as language-using creatures. They are not always as well-behaved as wolves, but everything humane depends on words — love, promise-keeping, story-telling, democracy. And baseball.

A game of episodes, not of flow, it leaves time for, and invites, conversation, rumination and speculation. And storytelling, by which Scully immerses his audience in baseball’s rich history, and stories that remind fans that players “are not wind-up dolls.”

In recent years, Scully has not accompanied the Dodgers on the road. Hence this recent tweet quoting an 8-year-old Dodgers fan, Zoe: “I hate when the Dodgers have away games. They don’t tell stories.”

Find Will’s whole piece here. Thank you to Stacey May Fowles, whose weekly feminist “Baseball Life Advice” newsletter opens a whole new window on baseball and feelings, and is my most reliable source of news and perspective on the One True Sport, for pointing me to it.