WILD THINGS!
Amazin’s headed back to playoffs
Mets manager Terry Collins is showered in suds after a 5-3 victory over the Phillies put the team in Wednesday’s wild-card game at Citi Field.
VIN SCULLY gives me insomnia. Three times in the recent past, I have tossed and turned all night trying to come up with the right words to describe a man who always seems to have them at his disposal. That’s just the tiniest window into what separates Vin from the rest of us in this business.
What is very much a craft to baseball broadcasters is art at its highest form to Scully; and what Michelangelo and Da Vinci and Picasso probably labored over for untold days and months, Vin Scully does extemporaneously.
The sleeplessness began in May, when the Mets were in Los Angeles. Vin agreed to sit down with me for an interview reflecting on his career, and the night before all I could think of was how to properly honor the man, someone with whom I would always visit when the Mets were at Dodger Stadium, without fawning. The conversation encompassed 17 of the most memorable minutes of my broadcasting career. Last week, I was asked to record a brief homage to Vin, which would be played at Citi Field and sent to Scully — along with similar tributes from all of the Mets broadcasters. Days later, I was asked to write this column. In both cases, the search for the proper accolades was exhausting. Truthfully, that’s how it should be, because suitable reverence must be paid to a man who has given us so much.
The inspiration he has provided me is multilayered and all encompassing. Professionally, he set the bar impossibly high, and though it is hopelessly beyond our reach, how could you not at least strive to get there?
His call of an injured Kirk Gibson’s game winning home run in the first game of the 1988 World Series was not as much brilliant for the few words that he used, as it was for how he used them. After a long pause to let the pictures tell the story, he said, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impos
sible has happened!!” It’s hard enough to find the perfect words at the right time, but the artistry was in the inflection. Without knowledge of the entire backstory, those few words and the way they were presented allowed even the most casual fan to realize the enormity of the moment.
His call of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game simply was poetic — particularly in the ninth inning, when Scully called the pitcher’s mound as Koufax neared the finish line “the loneliest place in the world.” That radio call should be a primer for every aspiring baseball broadcaster to grasp the importance of describing every available detail, paired with a use and command of the English language to create an image that lasts forever.
Those broadcasting lessons actually are dwarfed by the personal impact Vin Scully has made on my life.
Please don’t be misled. I barely know the man. I always have made it a point to stop into his broadcast booth to say a quick hello whenever I’ve had the chance, and the greatest impression of all that he has left with me is how he treats people. Everyone.
When a maintenance person at the ballpark stops in to empty the trash can, Vin stops what he is doing to engage that person — knows her name, asks about her family. As far as Vin is concerned, she is family, and treats her just as he would a team’s president. It is the same with the people in the press room, as well as fans he encounters on his way into or out of the booth. Trust me, as easy as Vin makes that seem, well, there are times when I am sure it is not.
We all have moods. They’re not always great. I have been out to dinner with my wife and daughters, or just enjoying a night out with friends when someone will come over and either introduce themselves or simply try to strike up a conversation. It almost always is welcome and flattering, but biorhythms being what they are, sometimes it is more of a challenge than others. That’s when I ask myself, “How would Vin handle it?” Hope- fully, I have done him justice.
I’m not a star struck high school kid — that was last year. Still, just being in Vin’s company for however fleeting a moment makes an impact. A couple of years ago, at the beginning of a series in Los Angeles, I popped in, uninvited — little more than an intruder to his booth. Immediately, Vin, who is a voracious reader, said somewhat excitedly that he just had to tell me about this great book he was reading, called “One Summer: America, 1927”, and how beautifully Bill Bryson intertwined his narrative around Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, the Mississippi Flood and Calvin Coolidge. I listened and smiled, and thanked him for the recommendation, all the while thinking to myself how cool it was that I was actually reading the same book at the same time as Vin Scully.
I left that encounter the same way millions of baseball fans will leave Vin’s final broadcast Sunday ... feeling that, whether they ever met him or not, they will be leaving the company of a friend. Quite simply, the greatest friend the game of baseball has ever known.