Vin Scully clarifies remarks on retirement

I wish you could have answered my phone.

I wish you could have answered the Thursday afternoon call from a Denver hotel room and listened to a greeting that would have made you smell popcorn, taste Dodger Dogs and feel chills.

"Hello, Bill? This is Vin Scully."

I've talked to the most trusted voice in the history of our city at least a dozen times over the phone during our long working relationship, and it never fails.

When he calls me, I freeze. When that voice fills the phone, I subconsciously expect it to break into a melodic description of a summer evening or a forlorn pitcher, so I wait.

"Bill? Bill?"

This time I didn't wait long. This time it was urgent, and I actually interrupted him in mid-poetic stream to ask a question.

"Are you retiring?"

I hated to ask it, because, goodness, I didn't want to put any ideas into his forever-red head, but I didn't have a choice.

This week, for the first time in, oh, about 59 years, Scully did not rule it out.

"There's a lot of hoopla in this job, but it's lonely for the wife," he told the New York Times during an appearance in Manhattan. "So I want to talk seriously with [Sandy] about her feelings, I want to know what's in her head. We'll talk it out over the long summer and then we'll talk to Frank" McCourt."

I saw the quotes, tracked him down, called his hotel room, he answered and said he would call me back, and he always, always calls back.

So he did, and I interrupted him in hurried fear.

"Are you retiring?"

He sighed. He said that print interviews sometimes fail to capture the proper tone in someone's voice.

"It came out a little heavy handed, and it really wasn't like that," Scully said.

"So, um, ah, are you retiring?"

Scully sighed again.

"It's not the end, I believe, or anything like that," he said.

I wish you could have answered my phone, then seen me toss it high in the air with relief.