Dick Enberg

Vin Scully isn’t the only broadcasting legend retiring after Sunday’s games. It’s up to the San Diego Padres to do something this weekend that will evoke an “Oh my!” or “Touch ’em all!” call from Enberg, 81, who will call his last game at Arizona. Is it the end of an era? “That’s an era only in that we all got old and we grew up in a different system,” Enberg said. “I go back to Harry Wismer calling football and Bill Stern. They fabricated sometimes, but it didn’t matter to me. I was listening as a kid and imagining in my own memory bank of what might be happening on the field, and then Red Barber and Mel Allen in baseball.

“Vin and I talked about that a couple of weeks ago, how fortunate we were to grow up in the era of black and white radio. The television picture now is the dominant part of any broadcast. It’s like giving away the punch line to the joke. It’s already there.

“Whereas on radio you can have 10 different people in a room listening to the same radio play-by-play broadcast and they’re seeing 10 different games the way their mind wanted to interpret it and receive it. That’s what’s really different between growing up in radio, where you paint the entire canvas, and now, where television is the dominant aspect of any game.”

Enberg’s first radio job was at a radio station in Mount Pleasant, Mich., when he was a junior at Central Michigan. He made $1 an hour.

He ended up in TV, doing Super Bowls, Olympics, Final Fours, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and many other big assignments. During his nine years broadcasting UCLA basketball, the Bruins won eight NCAA titles.

Enberg also broadcast nine no-hitters, including two by the Giants’ Tim Lincecum against the Padres in 2013 and 2014.