A Matter of Logic

I greatly enjoyed “How to Watch a Baseball Game”--Vin Scully’s primer--by Henry Weinstein (Oct. 13). However, since I knew Scully when he was just Vin Ordinaire, when we were classmates at Fordham University, I was greatly disappointed that Scully did not make mention of his college days, when he really began his broadcasting career as an announcer of sporting events on WFUV-FM, Fordham’s radio station. Scully also played infield on the varsity baseball team, and we played together on the junior varsity softball team that won a college championship. Surely this experience in baseball and broadcasting was not lost on the future “bard of the base paths.”

But I have no doubts, after reading the article, that his major in philosophy, under Fordham’s garrison of Jesuits, has had a profound influence on his career. Where else but from philosophy could he have learned to be the great analyzer of the game of baseball that he is? Note well that the author of the article states that Scully’s analyses range from “the specific to the cosmic.” Certainly, Scully’s appreciation of the cosmic is much more likely to be founded on his college course in cosmology than his conversations on the “Game of the Week” with a former catcher from St. Louis. And wouldn’t his course in logic be a better primer in understanding the tactics of Tommy (the Artful Dodger) Lasorda than a few years of bantering baseball with Barber, the Dodgers’ “Redhead No. 1?”

Finally, the conclusion by author Weinstein that Scully “was responsible for the creation of a new subspecies of humanity--the transistorized fan,” is a power only possible for one who understands the nature of existence, or, in a word, philosophy. Perhaps the article should, like Scully says of baseball, “be savored before being dissected.”

Thomas P. Rowland

Corona