Scully, Still the Best

The Braves opened up a three-game set in Dodger Stadium on Monday night. If you were watching in the LA area, or fortunate enough to have to the MLB Extra Innings package you would have heard the call from Baseball Immortal Vin Scully on FSN’s Prime Ticket broadcast.

Scully is Eighty years old, and he doesn’t sound a day over 60, and well, twenty years younger ain’t bad. He still seems sharp as a proverbial tack, and equally as sharp are is broadcast journalism skills. And in a day in age, where the lines might blur between announcer and journalist, it’s clear Scully is still investigating the stories of players some sixty years his junior.

After years of watching baseball on various networks around the country, it seems when announcers introduce players at the start of a series he might tell you how the player’s season is going, some other facts on the press sheets, or a story that might have gone around the league and is invariably mentioned each time the players goes into a new town. The Immortal Scully seems to always scoop the others on stuff you just couldn’t imagine.

He brilliantly describes every nook and cranny of the each game’s story. And complete with fifty-eight years of first-hand experience, the Vin-man single-handedly (that is without a color guy to try and play off of) manages to bring the game even closer to the fans at home, with other nooks and crannies about each player. He does this to the degree that by the time the visitors leave town, they’re not just players on the ballfield, they are added to the games list of colorful characters, because Vin made it that way.

Yunel Escobar would be a great example. The 25 year old shortstop for Atlanta was born in Cuba, and defected to the States in 2004. This is the basic story you’ll hear from every other announcer. On a night the infielder batted-in three of his teams nine runs, Scully managed to tell the story in much greater depth. It turns out Escobar, who also had whistling problem in the Minors that especially annoyed Jeff “Frenchy” Francoeur (one of the best college safeties in the country during his own time at Clemson), traveled on a twenty-five foot long boat carrying twenty-five other defectors for two days through 8-10 foot waves until finally reaching the shores of Miami, Florida. He was later signed by Atlanta and has been a starting infielder on the team for two years now.

Also on Tuesday night in LA, the Braves actually managed to put a bunch of runs on the board, and routed the Dodgers 9-3. Rookie Jair Jurjjens, whose teammates we learned call him J.J. and speaks five languages, struck out six in six innings of work, while giving up a run on five hits to push his record to 9-4.

All-Star catcher Brian McCann, from a baseball family (his Dad runs a baseball school in Georgia and was an infielder from Upstate New York, he turned down an offer from the Twins to go to Mississippi State, while his brother was drafted by the Marlins out of Clemson) hit two solo-homers giving him 17 on the year.

Mark Kotsay, still recovering from a sore back, collected three hits and scored twice, but the hard-nosed Centerfielder might be remembered by the folks who know him best as the one-time Number One ranked BMXer in the world.

And of course it was Atlanta, and what’s a Braves game without a Bobby Cox story? Well apparently the all-time leader in manager ejections also argued for his eventual wife’s phone number the first time they met. It was 1977 in Rome, Georgia, and Bobby along with three other minor league teammates were in a clothing store. It seems in the days before this particular one, suits were being stolen from the store at an alarming rate. When Bobby’s gang came in, the store manager, called the police. They came and realized they had not been stealing suits and they were in fact ball players. Bobby said to the store manager Pam, “well look, you almost got me arrested, the least you could do is give me your phone number.” She did, and they married soon thereafter.

So well into Wednesday morning on the East Coast, the youngest voice ever to call a World Series at the age of 25 was still entertaining, humanizing the athletes on the field in a way that just isn’t done any more. Instead, as I flipped the channel over to an Angels-Rangers game, the color “analyst” was begging for Garrett Anderson to “hit a single just like ya did earlier.”

Vin wouldn’t do that, he’s too busy informing the audience, covering as much ground as he could, and telling as much about the game and its players for as long as there are outs to go.