Rosenberg on Scully: Brush-Back Pitch or Down the Middle?

I’m not qualified to judge the accuracy of Howard Rosenberg’s comments on baseball announcers, save for one (“Aiming Some Chin Music at Major League Baseball Announcers,” Sept. 2). His attempt to satirize Vin Scully was both silly and sophomoric. Scully is to baseball broadcasting what Roy Hobbs was in “The Natural”: “The best there was, and the best there ever will be.”

For more than 50 years, he has been expert, congenial, entertaining, colorful, relentlessly cheerful, exasperatingly fair and, above all, thoroughly decent. If Rosenberg can’t appreciate those qualities, as I have since 1958 when the Dodgers and Scully first arrived in L.A., he should return to skewering “reality” shows and other TV nonsense. In that arena his humor is more often on target.

PAUL C. REISSER

Thousand Oaks

*

What, exactly, is Rosenberg’s gripe with Scully? Is there something wrong with an announcer who revels in the fact that children attend baseball games? His sing-song voice? His trademark greeting to fans before every game? The fact that he shows up three hours before the first pitch to do his research?

No. It’s that Scully has to think on his feet when he speaks to thousands of Dodger fans every night, and that he’s the best at it. Rosenberg, however, hides behind the printed word and has the opportunity to refine his every statement. His ill-masked jealousy pervaded the entire column.

GEOFF KERTESZ

Hollywood

*

I never thought anyone could be low enough to criticize Vin Scully. The most trusted man in Los Angeles? The kindest person on the air? I mean, what did Vinny do to incur Rosenberg’s ire? Did he diss his no-talent column? Did he vote against him in the Pulitzer voting? Did he draw devil horns on his picture? No, worse yet, he featured ordinary children of every color and age on camera and said nice things about them between innings! And he speaks understandable English in a very literate way that is music to the ears! What a crime!

JULIE T. BYERS

Temple City

*

Congratulations for being the first person in memory to not fawn over Vin Scully’s announcing of Dodger games. I, too, come close to gagging when he picks still another in the inexorable string of children out of the crowd and uses another of his seemingly scripted comments regarding them. If I wanted to see cute kids, I’d tune in some “cute kid show,” not a baseball game.

TODD TERRES

Camarillo

*

We don’t know what planet Rosenberg is from, but the world in which the rest of us live could sorely use all the kindness, intelligence and positive vibes Vin Scully blesses us with. Listening to Scully is as close to God as you can get without dying.

CHRISTINA SARKEES

BARBARA WEBER

San Diego

*

After reading Howard Rosenberg’s column about baseball announcers, I can tell that the poor man is overwrought. He needs a vacation, and I have just the ticket--to Atlanta!

B. HEIMBURGER

Rancho Mirage