Vin Scully is a baseball institution. He’s been announcing Dodger games for 64 years. That’s not a typo. Vin Scully IS baseball. He’s as wholesomely American as apple pie, and he’s had the same clean-cut professional appearance since he started announcing Brooklyn Dodger games during the Truman Administration.
That’s why, while listening to tonight’s game (Sept. 9, 2013 against the Diamondbacks in Arizona) I am both shocked and delighted to hear Scully continually referring to the Dodgers players going to Phoenix to “get well” after a rough stretch in Cincinnati.
Get well? That’s junkie talk!
In the next inning, Scully name-dropped a James Taylor lyric to describe an Arizona Diamondback player as a “churning urn of burning funk.” James Taylor is, among other things, a former junkie.
The Scullys.
There’s a picture that’s etched into my mind, and it happens to be of Mr. and Mrs. Vin Scully circa 1970. In it, she looks like a brunette version of Michelle Phillips from the Mamas and Papas, and he looks like the alpha male version of Vin Scully enjoying his day off.
That was Vin’s first wife, Joan, who died in her sleep at the age of 35 from an apparent accidental overdose of cold medication, leaving Vin a widower in 1973 with three children to raise.
The human side of Vin Scully. Reason #1063 why I still love baseball.
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