Requiem for a tour guide

In the fall of 2016 the Dodgers opened a Division Series in New York. The Mets would close it, in the 3-game minimum. With little to do, a reporter checked the subway map and rode out to where he thought Ebbets Field had stood. There was a sign for the “Jackie Robinson School,” but no other real commemoration that there might have been a ballpark, right there.

At Shea Stadium that night, Vin Scully smiled when Ebbets Field came up. Then he was asked how often he’d revisited the cradle of his career. He shook his head. “I really haven’t gone by there since we left,” Scully said. Meaning, the final game in 1957.

Scully would broadcast for 67 years and retired after the 2016 season as the most famous and essential Los Angeles Dodger of them all, and he will remain so, long past his death on Tuesday night at the age of 94.

He went out on the same level, the way Willie Mays and Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali could not. He was remarkably unchanged, always the jovial, earnest tour guide, taking the same people through the same game every night, but always on a different path, with endless factoids and stories about every signpost en route. Eric Nadel, the Texas Rangers’ announcer, liked to cite “the smile in his voice.”

Scully never lost that or anything else, really, and at the end of the tour he would greet everyone and go home and get ready to do it the next day. Despite the good intentions and the talent of those who have followed him, the trip hasn’t been the same.

Scully thrived precisely because he never went back to Ebbets Field. His most important day was his next one. He was surprisingly unmoved when the Dodgers abandoned Vero Beach for a cheerless foundry in the Arizona wastelands. He was not a nostalgist, never a yesterday man, even though he would lament that you never see a good musical anymore like South Pacific. Every morning during the season he was hunting for clippings, anecdotes about ballplayers on both sides that no one else could find, and he did it all himself, the same way he did the games.

. This is not to say that Scully was enamored with 21st century baseball. He pointedly avoided the analytical debris that paralyzes the modern announcer. The fact that Justin Turner might have sent a 98 mph fastball screaming with 106 mph exit velocity, and that his double might have been a home run in 16 other ballparks, did not interest Scully. Having seen everything Koufax and Drysdale and Hershiser did, he had trouble disguising his amusement over the pitch-counted starter who leaves in the fifth.

He also had problems with the nine-inning cacophony that gradually replaced the buzz of the crowd, plus Scully’s own voice through the transistor radios.

“I think there will be two things that I will see before I die,” Scully once said. “One is a player who makes so much money that he hires someone to play for him. The other is a human sacrifice at home plate before a game.”

When Scully did World Series games for NBC, he did not have to adjust to neutrality. During Dodger games he was scrupulously charitable to the opposing team, celebrated their accomplishments as he would those of the Dodgers, and allowed the umpires to umpire. Nor did he hang around the dugout beforehand, or pretend to be close to the players. He observed boundaries.

But when it was time for him to speak for the game itself, he was willing. On Sept. 17, 2001, Scully spoke from the video board as the first post 9/11 crowd assembled in Dodger Stadium. He said it was time for “baseball to pick itself up and dust itself off,” and called for “a national firmness of will.” The fans listened. His was the voice they’d been longing to hear.

There were things he would say that would make you hit the brakes and laugh, or call a friend immediately. He found himself in the 19th inning of a 22-inning game at Houston and told the remaining viewers, “What do you think? Should they just cut for the high card?” When the Dodgers had outfielder Chin-feng Chen and pitcher Chin-hui Tsao, Scully said, “My biggest fear as an announcer is that they will both be involved in a rundown.”

He insisted on righteousness. Part of that was religion, as he would sit quietly at the Dodgers’ Sunday morning chapels, but most of it was the effort to actually do the things that he knew he should. Somehow that’s an impossible mountain for most of us.

But Scully was unfailingly nice to people he knew he would never see again. He was thoughtful in his advice to fellow broadcasters and journalists. He cared about the folks who worked the elevators at the stadium or bussed the tables in the press box. He traded pre-game laughs with the major league scouts. He absolutely loved jokes and had good sources for them. “Here’s one that Buddy Hackett told me the other day,” he’d say.

When he grew up in the apartment near the Polo Grounds, he noticed blue stars on some doors, gold stars on others. They symbolized the men who were still fighting in World War II and those who would never return. He saw the Army officials solemnly knock on doors and deliver the news. He remembered hearing about Pearl Harbor, when he was 14, and telling his stepfather Allen Reeve, who was a Merchant Marine veteran. “He said, ‘Oh, my God,” Scully recalled. “He knew exactly what that meant.”

He did a college football game on top of a press box and did it well enough that Red Barber brought him inside for his next one: Harvard and Yale. He began doing one inning a day on the Dodger games, then more and more. He had the mic at the end of the 1955 World Series when the Dodgers finally won, and that night he took his date, Joan Ganz, to the team party at Brooklyn’s Lexington Hotel. Joan Ganz later became Joan Ganz Cooney and created Sesame Street. “Boy, did I mess that one up,” Scully would say.

Scully retired in 2016. His final game was in San Francisco, where the Dodgers were playing as he died. The final years weren’t kind, by all accounts. He’d lost his beloved wife Sandy, and there weren’t as many things that mattered anymore.

The Beatles ended their Abbey Road album by singing that, in the end, “the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Nobody on earth balanced that equation like Vin Scully, tour guide on a baseball road that went on forever, until it didn’t.