Can’t get enough Vin Scully

Until now, I have never written a column about which readers have called and emailed with their unanimous and uncritical approval.

My “Patt Morrison Asks” column about Vin Scully was a first. Now, it wasn’t me they approved of; it was Vincent Edward Scully, the voice of Dodger baseball.

Scully has been calling Dodger games longer than Queen Victoria was on the throne, and like the queen’s subjects, most Dodger fans have never known a Dodger season without Scully calling its plays.

The official Vin Scully lexicon

So many readers wanted to tell me of their particular favorite Vin Scully moments that I chose a couple of the best to share:

Jon Pedersen in Burbank wrote with one of his fondest memories: “a late-summer game where a hitter was being annoyed by a very persistent house fly. It was buzzing his face and he kept having to call ‘time’ with the umpire.

“Vin commented on it once. After the fly seemed to cause another delay, Vin said, ‘You know, that must be the dreaded infield fly people talk about.’

“I laughed so hard I fell off the sofa.”

And from Ft. Mohave, Ariz., John Jenkins wrote of being a boy growing up in Pico Rivera, “listening to table top and small transistor radio tuned to Dodger games. I fondly remember going to bed as a child, summer evenings with our windows open, lying in bed listening to that voice calling out the games. We now live in Arizona but still look forward to trips (‘inside,’ as we call a trip to SoCal) so I might catch Vin calling out a game.”

The man is clearly a household god.

I could have talked to Scully through nine innings and still not finished my interview, but he had a game to get ready for. I did ask him about that prep: Did he get to Dodger Stadium early for a game, maybe fortify himself with a Dodger dog?

Oh no, he said. He’s usually there by 3:30 p.m. Back before he started doing TV too, he had a lot more time to spend down on the field and in the locker room with the teams, and “because of television there’s a lot of preparing for taping long before the game, so nowadays I’ll go down maybe once in a series and come into the booth and prepare.”

“By the time we tape and everything else, it’s 10 after 5 and I’ll have something to eat and at about 6 I always call home and talk to my wife, and all of a sudden it’s time to do the game.”

That a World Series ring you’re wearing? I ask. Yes, he says, ’88, the last one.

Wow. So it is.

Maybe it’s not just time for Dodger baseball. Maybe it’s time for Dodger baseball that puts another piece of classic baseball bling on Vin Scully’s finger.

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