VOICE OF L.A. DODGERS
STILL GOING STRONG
AFTER  64  YEARS
 
Games available on MLB
Extra Innings package
 
By David Maril
 
There’s no end these days to the programming that sports fans can purchase on satellite and cable television or for their computers.

If you’ve got the time, interest and money, telecasts of every NFL game can be brought into your home.

If you are an Orioles’ fan living outside The Land Of Pleasant Living, most of the team’s broadcasts are available on the MLB Extra Innings package [click here for schedule].

One of the best parts of the baseball package is you hear the broadcasts with local announcers.  This means when the Los Angeles Dodgers are shown, you experience the greatness of Vin Scully if the Dodgers are home or on the West Coast.

Listening to Scully announce a game is a rare privilege for any baseball fan.

At age 85, the only concession Scully has made in his 64th season with the Dodgers is to cut back on his travel schedule.

He primarily broadcasts from Dodger Stadium and restricts his travel to the cities on the West Coast. But when he broadcasts, he works the entire game without a partner, whether nine innings or 25 innings, calling every pitch.

It’s ironic it takes the futuristic technology of cable and satellite television to make it possible for fans all over the country to receive a taste of old-fashioned baseball announcing. While Dodger games have the typical modern-day overblown production values, with distracting graphics and annoying background music, Scully’s eloquence remains the focus of the broadcast.

He shows no signs of slowing down. His voice sounds very much today as it did back in 1966 when he shared TV and radio network World Series duties on NBC’s coverage of the Orioles winning their first World Championship, sweeping the Dodgers in four games.

WORKED WITH CHUCK THOMPSON AND CURT GOWDY

Scully worked with Chuck Thompson and Curt Gowdy back then. It’s no coincidence all three were inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

These days, when you first tune in a Dodger game, it’s a bit of a shock. While enjoying Scully’s  melodic and precise play-by-play, you keep waiting for an interruption by a former player overstating the obvious.

A couple more innings go by and you wonder if his missing partner got trapped in the press elevator or went home sick after eating too many hot dogs.

If the contest goes 22 innings, Scully will still be there, alone.

After a few innings of Scully, you experience greater enjoyment watching baseball, and start listening a lot closer. You realize it’s unnecessary to have two or three competing voices on a broadcast, making trivial conversation about what they had for dinner or how they did on the golf course.

Scully’s format is a throwback to the way sports announcing used to be. In the old days, Red Barber, Scully’s mentor with the Dodgers, and Mel Allen, the legendary Voice of the Yankees,  would split nine innings on the World Series and only talk to each other when they read commercials or switched play-by-play duties halfway through the game.

CRISP, CONCISE STYLE A PLEASURE TO HEAR

It was this way with the Orioles for years. Ernie Harwell, who later became the voice of the Detroit Tigers, and Herb Carneal, who went on to the Minnesota Twins, were a pleasure to hear with their crisp, concise style in the early days of the big-league Orioles.

Both are also in baseball’s Hall of Fame at Cooperstown.

I can remember growing up in Baltimore with the great Chuck Thompson doing the first half of televised games by himself and then swapping places with Joe Croghan, Frank Messer or Bill O’Donnell to work the last half alone on radio.

In the old days, the good baseball announcers, especially on radio, set the tone, composed a tempo and painted a lyrical picture. They had a smooth, soothing and appealing cadence that wore well over a 162-game season.

STYLE KEPT ALIVE BY SCULLY

This style, which has gone the way of starting pitchers completing games, is kept alive by Scully. The Voice of the Dodgers, who has been inducted into every conceivable sports broadcasting hall of fame,  deftly describes the action and talks about the game while smoothly mixing in interesting biographical information. He brings your attention to pertinent trends and statistics without sounding like a drone reading the press notes supplied by the team.

Scully might say, “If you are thinking of having Fred McGriff  hit away on 3-0, you must be remembering he’s 19-for-28 lifetime against Greg Maddux.”

I remember years ago when then-21-year-old Jake Peavy of the Padres was mowing down the Dodgers, Scully provided everything you’d want to know about how he’d risen to the big leagues after growing up in Mobile, Ala.

USED PART OF SIGNING BONUS TO BUY PICKUP TRUCK

“And after deciding to go with the Padres instead of pitching at Auburn University, he took part of his signing bonus and did what any other young outdoorsman would do. He bought himself a pickup truck,” Scully intoned.

In just three innings, you learn more about the two teams he is describing than if you listened to Tim McCarver  talk non-stop for three weeks.

It’s easy to see why Scully works so well by himself. He captures the uncertain and irregular flow of baseball without wasting words.

Years ago, when he was doing NBC games and saddled with the loquacious Joe Garagiola, his effectiveness and style were cramped.

He brings perspective to his broadcasts: While responding enthusiastically to the development of a promising rookie, he can also provide first hand observations of historical figures like Jackie Robinson, Leo Durocher and Sandy Koufax.

SUPERB RADIO PLAY-BY-PLAY CRAFTSMAN

Known early on as a superb radio play-by-play craftsman, Scully also mastered  television. Instead of the redundancy many TV baseball announcers project, telling you what you are watching, Scully literally frames the picture, enhancing your view.

When the drama builds, he lets the events deliver the impact. Instead of screaming into the microphone when something important, or unimportant, happens, he knows when to step back and let the roar of the crowd and the emotion conveyed by the players capture the scene. It’s a pity that so many baseball broadcasters today find it necessary to shriek even when a batter pops up.

The Orioles, by the way, are very fortunate to have a radio announcer of the caliber of Joe Angel. He’s a bit of a throwback, equipped with a distinctive rough, rich baseball voice and a feel for the pace of the game.

The Orioles have had an impressive history of Hall of Fame baseball voices. Besides Thompson and Harwell, Jon Miller and Bob Murphy also did games for the Birds.

Even if you don’t like the Dodgers, Scully’s artistry is a breath of fresh air in this age of trivial, nonstop chatter. With legendary baseball voices like Harwell, Gowdy, Thompson, Barber, Allen, Harry Caray, Jack Buck, Ned Martin and Bob Prince gone, you hope Scully keeps going strong for many more seasons.
 
davidmaril@hermanmaril.com
 
EDITOR’S NOTE:

Voice of Baltimore remembers Chuck Thompson broadcasting for the International League Orioles on WITH-AM radio in the late 1940s and early 50s. He began broadcasting the Orioles a year before Vin Scully started with the Dodgers.

As it was minor league baseball — the Birds were then the farm team for the American League St. Louis Browns (who would later move to Baltimore in 1954) — Thompson did not travel to away games.

As he reported the play-by-play you could hear the ticker-tape click-clicking in the background. Yet he described the game as if he were sitting in a front-row box-seat in the out of town ballpark.

Despite the telegraph’s giving him only bare-bones information — i.e., whatever the score and count were at the moment, or where a ball may have been hit or caught — it was not unusual, even expected, to hear him intone between pitches:

“The batter steps back into the batting box; he kicks the dirt. The pitcher toes the rubber; he looks over to first. He hesitates; he winds, he throws… and it’s strike one called! a fastball on the outside corner.”

All this, despite the fact he couldn’t see any of it — or even be aware of anything other than that the pitch was a strike. More often than not, he didn’t even know if the batter had swung at the ball or if the umpire simply called the strike.

He was that good! it’s why he’s in the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. Too bad the Pro Football Hall of Fame has failed to accord him similar recognition for his exemplary broadcasting of the Baltimore Colts.

Chuck Thompson died at the age of 83 in Baltimore County in 2005.
 
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