Vin Scully
I ask, nay beg all sports announcers to catch one of Scully’s games before he goes and see how it’s done – anecdotes of considerable interest, not mindless statistics; the ability at 88 to carry the ballgame himself, and real knowledge, not notes passed by a kid with a laptop. I, a devoted baseball fan since that turkey, Mickey Owen, dropped that third strike in 1941, have trouble watching now, what with three in the booth, each trying to dominate, none worth listening to, and frequent interviews with someone in the dugout in the middle of play.
Baseball is as good as ever, if not better. The players are in better shape. Sadly, the announcing is terrible, the “homerism” nauseating and the knowledge mostly irrelevant drivel picked off a computer by a football fan.
There is, you see, no need for an old man like me to say “you should have heard announcers in the good old days” when for a while longer you can still hear the very best of those “good old days”, Vince (Vin) Scully.
Article by Tyler Kepner in the New York Times: A Few Words About Vin Scully, a Storyteller Who Has Seen It All
I first heard that voice listening to Dodgers’ games on KFI in the early 1960s via the radio signal skip.The voice still sounds great in 2016.