60 years of knowledge

I found this in the new web site called "Circling the bases" It is about Vin Sully, announcer for the Dodgers for 60 years. When I grew up in Burbank, California I can remember hearing him on the radio. I think I could pick his voice out of all of the announcers of Major League Baseball.

Vin Scully threw out the first pitch at Dodger Stadium yesterday. In a world where broadcast legends are dying, pretenders to the crown don't mind embarrassing themselves, and sideshows seem to be the order of the day, it's nice to have something solid like Scully to latch onto.

As Aaron noted in the Link-O-Rama yesterday, Scully is incapable of being anything other than note-perfect. He works alone while every other organization crams an increasing number of announcers into the booth. He'll go silent for long stretches while others yammer in the mistaken belief that the unadorned sounds of the ballpark constitute dead air. When he does speak he uses the number of words necessary to communicate the thought rather than talk a concept up, down, in, out and around, with the heart of that practice being the assumption that his listeners are not idiots. How novel.

The kicker to all of this is that none of the things Vin Scully does are done by virtue of some supernatural talent. Indeed, he'd probably be the first to tell you that his abilities were learned and honed with experience as opposed to being God-given. Sure, not everyone could do it, but there are certainly would-be announcers out there who, if allowed to work alone and encouraged to keep things simple, could develop into a poor-mans' Vin Scully if given the time to do so. Why no team has even experimented with such a setup in recent decades is an utter mystery to me.