Dodgers announcer Scully prepares to retire

Legendary career that began at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn ends Saturday

Vin Scully, who began broadcasting Dodger games when the team was in Brooklyn, calls his final game Saturday.

LOS ANGELES >> The threering binder chock full of tidbits Vin Scully wants to talk about on the air will soon be flipped shut for the last time.

The Hall of Fame broadcaster will conclude his 67year career on Oct. 2 in San Francisco.

“I’m trying very hard not to think about me,” he said Saturday during a 50-minute session with the media. “I want to think about the game and the importance of the game.”

The game has always been the thing for Scully, starting in 1950 when he joined Red Barber and Connie Desmond in the Brooklyn Dodgers radio and television booth — a time when the team called Ebbets Field home. Barber was the father figure, Desmond was the big brother and Scully was the 22-year-old kid.

Early on, Scully declared on the air that Willie Mays was the best player he’d ever seen.

An irritated Barber pulled him aside afterward, lecturing, “You haven’t been around long enough to talk about the best player you’ve ever seen.”

“Connie would put his arm around me,” Scully recalled, “and say, ‘It’s OK, kid. Let’s go get a beer.”’

Scully’s broadcasts focus on stories involving the people on the field rather than baseball statistics. He admits having “no idea” about newer stats like WAR (wins above replacement) or OPS (on base plus slugging percentages).

“I’m not smart enough to keep all those numbers in my head,” he said. “I got to know the players. I started to treat them like human beings. I would be by the batting cage. A player might come over and say, ‘You know what happened to the shortstop yesterday?’ and I would have a story.”

As the longest tenured broadcaster with a single team in any professional