Vin Scully Appreciation Night #1

Vin Scully, as you may know, has been broadcasting Dodger games since the team was in Brooklyn, and the man a national treasure.

What you may not know is that this means he's about 600 years old. Who knows how much longer he'll be around.

While Scully lives, we ought to enjoy him.

We get the Dodgers broadcast on our MLB Extra Innings package when they are playing at Chavez Ravine. So we're going to try to have a few Vin Scully Appreciation Events this season.

The first such event will be this Saturday night (4/15), with the Dodgers at home facing their hated rivals, the Giants. The game begins at 7pm. As a special treat, we'll serve Farmer John hot dogs--the same brand served at Dodger Stadium.

Here's more about Vin Scully if you care...

He does exhaustive research on every player. Fred McGriff will be batting and he'll all of a sudden launch, in that silky, perfectly-metered voice, into "Fred's mother says his favorite cereal as a child...was Cocoa Puffs. He attended Biljam P. Crabgrass Elementary where, in the third grade, he nearly won the spelling bee, but was eliminated on the word "thorough."

My favorite Vin Scully story, though, is this. And I'm serious not making this up...Jason Little of the Rockies was batting during a day game--a pretty dull game, really.

"At 16 years of age, Jason Little woke up on the morning he was to take the SATs, walked into his mother's bedroom, and found her ...(and here, Scully took a perfectly timed pause that was long enough to create expectation but not long enough to make you think something weird was coming) ... dead!"

The man's a genius. There's a DJ on WNYC in New York who does a special baseball show annually on Super Bowl Sunday...one thing he always includes is Scully's call of the very last inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game. It's amazing to hear. Scully never pauses, never fumbles for a word, never includes an unneccessary word. And after he describes the final out, he doesn't say anything--he let's the crowd's cheering tell the story.