Consciously or not, Major League Baseball took its first wobbly steps last week into the next epoch.
Just as Christian historical scholarship once crossed a demarcation between B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno Domini, or in the year of our Lord), baseball now finds itself fearfully in what you might call A.V. _ after Vin.
Vin Scully was not parked at a play-by-play mic last week for the first time since 1949. He reportedly spent part of Opening Day at a Los Angeles area car wash, and there was no word on what that sounded like.
"It's time for washing the car!"
Oh god, what shall we do?
Well, let's at least start with an exercise of admittedly dubious purpose, namely wondering aloud if anyone, anywhere can take Scully's singular, storied, gloried place in baseball's ever-changing culture.
Because it might have been Joe Block, now just settling into his second year as a Pirates play-by-play voice after spending four with the Milwaukee Brewers.
"In 2009, the Dodgers had an audition for six announcers to do the TV games that Vin was not going to do," said Block, who was then hosting the postgame show on the Dodgers' radio network. "I was one of those six. I didn't get it, but for a brief time, I was put in the position of thinking, 'Wait, are they considering me to replace Vin Scully?' Just having that notion for a few weeks, that was very daunting."
The man who would physically replace Scully on the Dodgers broadcasts eight years later turned out to be 29-year-old Joe Davis, whom Block last week called "the most talented young broadcaster I've ever known," but replacing Scully's singular linguistic aura still looms as baseball's Mission Impossible.
"There's no replacing Vin Scully," Block said. "When I first heard the phrase 'poet laureate,' I thought, 'Yeah, that's him.' His style and his way cannot be replaced and for a number of reasons. I just don't think there are that many people who are as well read as he is _ not broadcasters, people! I mean, to be able to refer to classic works on a whim. And you also can't replicate history. They guy who just left the job interviewed Connie Mack! Connie Mack was born during the Civil War! You think about 1950, Vin's first year, baseball had just been integrated and the eight teams in each league had been in place since 1903 and hadn't moved. He goes from the way baseball was then to calling the homeruns of Justin Turner.
"I mean how is that possible?"
The length and breadth and gross baseball tonnage of Scully's silken rhetoric has proven hard to characterize, but I've come to think of it this way. I'm 63 years old, and when Vin Scully first welcomed listeners to a Dodgers game, my father was in high school. When my father died at 78, Scully did Dodgers games for another six seasons.
But it isn't the sheer weight of Scully the game has lost; it's the ultra-rich texture of his craftsmanship and what it did not only for baseball, but for language and literacy.
"Vinny probably has the greatest command of the English language of anyone who ever sat in a broadcast booth," said Cincinnati Reds legend Marty Brennaman, who came along a generation after Scully and went straight to the broadcasters wing of the Hall of Fame. "So as to replacing him, I would say no. To begin with, we all concede he's the best that's ever been in baseball and if baseball's played for another 1,000 years, he's still gonna be the best. Anybody, especially inside of our play-by-play fraternity, who thinks they're going to replace him is delusional, and I'm talking about some damn good broadcasters."
So the Scully Standard is essentially unapproachable, but that doesn't mean someone can't emerge as the next acclaimed Voice of Baseball, nor that it hasn't already happened.
"I think of someone like (the Giants') Jon Miller, who for so long was synonymous with Sunday night (and ESPN), and if I was growing up in Baltimore before that, I'd have thought Jon Miller to be synonymous with baseball," said Kirk McKnight, who's written two books on the play-by-play discipline including 'The Voices of Baseball: The Game's Greatest Broadcasters reflect on American's Pastime.' "There are several legends like that, Marty Brennaman for example, but Vin isn't the only guy who won't be replaced _ Bob Prince, there's never going to be someone else like him."
Growing up in Virginia, Brennaman fell in love with the play-by-play ethos listening to Prince late at night on KDKA. But if Prince and eventually Brennaman flourished in a age when play-by-play men were full-blown characters, as large or larger in the audience's heart than the teams and the players they were squawking about _ Harry Caray, Ralph Kiner, Jack Buck, Harry Kalas, Bob Uecker playing Harry Doyle as Bob Uecker in Major League etc. _ the inevitable cultural changes that most of half a century brings have made for a far less conspicuous occupation populated primarily with more evidently disciplined pros, numbingly solid but seriously constricted by 21st century broadcasts. They're essentially doing a three-hour infomercial for the club, its promotions, its ballpark experience, and its broadcasting outlets.
Nowhere today, for example, can you absorb anything like a Phillies broadcast from the early '70s, when color man Richie Ashburn explained to play-by-play ace Harry Kalas that when he had a hitting streak he'd often take his bat to bed with him, not trusting the clubhouse buys to give him the same bat the next day, adding, "Harry I've slept with a lot of old bats."
"That's dead on it," Brennaman said, "and it's not a criticism of the current crop of broadcasters. There was just no greater character on earth in a Major League Broadcast booth than Bob Prince was. But I liken it to the PGA golf tour, where in the '50s and '60s, you had Palmer and Trevino and Chi Chi Rodriguez that were great golfers but they were also genuine characters. Now you have a PGA Golf Tour made up of Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth and players that are incredibly talented, but in terms of having the personality of Palmer, who brought the game to the forefront and gave it its TV profile that it deserved, you don't have that any more. Again, it's not a knock on those guys. But the fraternity of baseball broadcasters is very similar to that track. They just aren't outgoing characters like that."
Given contemporary restraints, including perhaps common sense, today's voices of baseball can't enjoy the kind of latitude once evident to the role.
"Anyone even remotely in the public today has to be aware of the consequences of having fun and being yourself," said Block. "You see very few people who will just throw caution to the wind. I was with Bob Uecker for four years and the stories he had _ what he did _ they would walk down Boylston Street in Boston after the bars closed with a police escort. It was all a laugh. Today, if an announcer or an ex-player and several star players were out on the town one night getting a police escort, first of all, the police would escort them to jail, not to the hotel. There would be viral video. People just don't do that anymore. I feel that pressure . I'm a lot more fun and loose than I seem on the air."
Block wouldn't necessarily agree that cultural and commercial restrictions have compromised the colorful quality of play-by-play, nor with my general criticism that the 21st century game on radio and TV, rather than being described, is getting explained to death, with seemingly every pitch analyzed like the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.
"Informing people about the game, the finer points of the game, I think that's as good today as it's ever been," Block said. "It used to be two guys in a booth talkin' ball, now there's a very pointed role for the analyst to detail the finer points of a certain play."
Yep, there sure is, and he'll have plenty of opportunity to do that what with the five replays of that ground ball to second.
Nonetheless, I'll happily settle in for seven months of baseball gab, even if I'm hoping that just once, when a pitcher comes to bat with a runner or runners in scoring position, the play-by-play will refrain from saying "he's got a chance to help himself!"
Hey, to heck with himself. They're trying to win a ballgame here. I don't care which hurler gets the 'W'. Frankly I care more about how Vin made out at the car wash.
