Vin Scully's Last Game

After 67 years behind the microphone, Vin Scully will call his last baseball game this afternoon at 3 PM. Dodgers at Giants.

Grant Brisbee, SB Nation:

Baseball on the radio sticks around as a kind of anachronism as the rest of the world shifts to television for its news and entertainment, and it sticks around long after the quality of televised baseball improves. Not only is it the format that you can sneak up to your room, follow at work, and bring to the beach with you, but the pace of the game fits it perfectly.

Baseball is action and inaction, with the gaps giving us time to breathe, time to contemplate the next move. It’s sort of a cliché to compare baseball to chess, but ... c'mon, the fastball's the rook, the curveball's the bishop, the slider's the knight ... here, let me draw you a diagram. As the catcher and pitcher are figuring this all out, the hitter is going through the permutations in his head, too. Runners are leading. The crowd is roaring. Everyone crouches down and waits for the next active moment. There's tension. Oh, how there's tension.

And there's a voice describing it all. When you're following the radio, you get one sense to work with, and then you have to fill the rest in on your own. That means your imagination has to do at least a quarter of the work, and sometimes it sighs and complains, but it's OK because you're your imagination's biggest fan. It was designed just for you, you know.

Scully was that voice for everyone, echoing through the garage while you were under a car, in the car as you were going for a drive, at the mechanic's because you had no business being under the car in the first place. When you're young, old, in-between, with an old friend, remembering an old friend, everywhere.

When television took over, Scully spent more and more time on the medium, for different sports and different audiences. But the foundation of the affection felt for him, the necessity of him, was built on the stream of consciousness coming over the radio. It was perfect for him. Baseball was perfect for the radio. He was perfect for baseball. The feedback loop got stronger with each decade.

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It helps that Scully is the best, of course, a master storyteller with a photographic memory and appreciation for tangents. It helps that his voice is unquestionably the archetype of what a sports broadcaster's voice should be — calm, sonorous, with enough range to let you know when the really important stuff is happening. It helps that he knows he's there in service of the game, not the other way around, which means there are times when it's better to shut up and let the crowd call the game for a little bit.

It's possible that Scully holds the highest possible approval rating for anyone who's done any job in the history of the world. ...

Everyone else loves him. Probably because he's the best.