Whatever You Do, Don’t Miss Vin Scully
For anyone who doesn’t know this, anyone can watch a baseball game on mlb.tv as soon as it is over. You go to www.sports.yahoo.com/mlb and then go to the sides where the scores are listed and instead of clicking on box score, click on mlb.tv archive. The whole game is broadcast with the home team announcers.
This morning, I wanted to watch a few innings and I heard Vin Scully for the first time that I remember.
Let me put it this way - Vin Scully: baseball broadcasting = Barry Lamar Himself: playing baseball.
I am not kidding. Not only does the guy know baseball, not only does he not miss pitches, plays or even entire batters (MILO!!!!!) but he is extremely knowledgeable about each and every Astros player, no matter his role on the team.
And best of all, he never finds it necessary to use cutesy phrases (holy toledo!!!!) or scream and shout or get hysterical. He’s just smooth, tells a great story and makes the whole game even better.
Don’t get me wrong - I love Brownie and JD and believe they are absolutely outstanding. But it is kind of like comparing Lance Berkman to Barry Lamar - Lance is an absolutely outstanding baseball player (as Vin pointed out, twice, last year, a supposedly bad year, he hit 34 homers and drove in 101 runs on a weak offensive team - a year that almost every other major leaguer would love to have had) but Barry Lamar, as Lance himself once said, is on another planet.
Vin Scully used to do national broadcasts, back when only a couple games a week at most were broadcast by the national stations. Why on earth Fox wouldn’t pay the moon for someone like him instead of the guys they have now I don’t get. I suppose that Fox isn’t interested in excellence, but in attracting the millions of casual fans who prefer Charlie the talking baseball and stupid sound effects and sprinkler-cam and fan-cam and interviews with some nobody actor/actress DURING the action.
Sigh. I just turned 28 and I am getting old. Get offn my lawn!!!!!!!!!
Which reminds me, I forgot to post info about Chad Billingsley (what happens when you get up and write at 3 AM. Games starting at 9:45 are teh sukc…
Chad Billingsley, RHP, age 23, was the Dodger’s 1st round pick in 03 out of HS.
He was called up in 06 and started 16 games, relieved in 2 and threw 90 innings with a 3.80 ERA and a 1.67 WHIP. He had a low K rate - 5.9/ 9 IP and, unfortunately, the same BB rate. What kept his ERA that low was a low hit rate (1/IP) and a lot of unearned runs - 8 of 44.
Last year, he was used as both a starter and reliever - starting 20 games and relieving in 23 more. Over 147 IP, he had an ERA 3.31 and a 1.33 WHIP. He also decreased his BB rate to 3.92/9, his hit rate to 8/9IP and increased his K rate to 8.63.
This year, he’s 2-4 in 6 GS and 2 in relief over 33.2 IP - 32 H, 2 HR, 21 BB, 44 K: 4.54 ERA, 1.57 WHIP and a .250 BAA. (By the way, that is a simply phenomenal K rate for a starter - 11.76K/9)
He lost his first 4 starts, going 2.1 innings the first, 5 each for the next 2, then gave up 5 ER/6 IP (The Dbax KILL this guy), but gave up 1 ER/7 IP to the NL East leading Florida Marlins (yes, I read that right) and 1 ER/ 6 IP to the supposed to be NL leading Mets.
Against Houston, he’s 1-1 with a CG. He gave up 2 ER/9 IP and 4 ER/5 IP. Of the Astros hitters, only Geoff Blum has had more than 10 AB and he’s 2/11. We’ll see how he does against this team this year…
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7 Responses to “Whatever You Do, Don’t Miss Vin Scully”
May 10th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Lisa—Tell me what I haven’t known about Viscount Vin. It should have been an act of Congress that Vin Scully shall broadcast the World Series until his death or retirement, whichever comes first.—Jeff
May 10th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Lisa-Been lurking for awhile and I really enjoy your Astro blogs, (though I think your a bit tough on Drayton at times), but I can’t agree with you on Scully. I’ll take Milo and his, “can of corn”, or “Holy Toledo”, any day. Scully reminds me too much of Gene Elston, just doesn’t bring any excitement to the broadcast.
Anyway, keep up the fine work, and Go Astros!
May 11th, 2008 at 12:36 am
jeff,
appreciate the links!!!
dallas,
i USED to like milo, but his habit of not saying what inning it is, what the score is, what the count on the batter is - well, it is more than just irritating.
vin doesn’t just talk about what he did on his hunting trip 40 years ago with someone no baseball fan knows who it is. he talks about the players, their history and somehow, never forgets the essentials. LIKE THE BATTER!!!!!
i don’t want excitement brought to the broadcast - i want to be the one who decides whether or not to GET excited.
but there are (unfortunately for their fans) not just a few broadcasters out there incredibly worse than milo and his sidekicks
May 11th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Dallas—I don’t know which Vin Scully you’ve been listening to, but the one I’ve been listening to for lo these many years hasn’t exactly been bereft of “excitement.” He merely refuses to holy Toledo his cans of worms every third base hit. It merely begins with the link I shared earlier (it’s to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game, itself a masterpiece of spontaneous prose poetry, and often anthologised under the title, “Twenty Thousand People and a Million Butterflies”) and continues with such as the following:
* After Joe Garagiola, his NBC partner, crowed that he’d “bet the house” that Mets pitcher Jesse Orosco would have to bunt—with the Red Sox putting on the rotation play in a bid to choke the bunt—Orosco pulled back his bat as the pitch was released and tapped a six-hopper up the pipe to drive in Ray Knight. Here was Scully’s call of that pitch and swing:
Swinging! and a ground ball into center field. In comes Knight, it is eight to five, Mets, and Joe, you just lost your house!
* . . . It is four to three, A’s, in the middle of the ninth, and Dennis the Menace is coming to work.—As Dennis Eckersley stepped from the pen in Dodger Stadium, Game One, 1988 World Series.
* . . . “On a night filled with the improbable, the impossible has happened!”—After Kirk Gibson took Eckersley over the right field fence to end that game.
* . . . “You really ought to just hear it for yourself, so I’m just going to keep my mouth shut.”—Cutting to complete silence, save the Dodger Stadium racket, for the entire at-bat, when Eric Gagne (then at his peak as an elite closer, and arguably the most popular Dodger at the time) went to work against Bernie Williams in an interleague game, and punched him out called with a ferocious changeup.
* . . . The night the Dodgers stupefied the San Diego Padres and the Dodger Stadium audience with those four consecutive bombs (two off Trevor Hoffman) in the bottom of the ninth to turn a 9-5 deficit into extra innings, crowned by Nomar Garciaparra’s walkoff bomb in the tenth.
Scully has known that it is the game—the pitch, the swing, the play, the audience—that provides the excitement, and that the poet should augment and enhance it, not try to provide it. He always has. He always will. There’s room enough for our Milos, but there’s only one Vin Scully. And the beauty of it is that he genuinely doesn’t get it. He still thinks he’s just a guy going to work every day who got bloody lucky.
Like hell.
—Jeff
May 11th, 2008 at 6:52 am
Lisa, that’s what I’ve been saying we had with the great Gene Elston - and they fired him to let Milo take over!
DallasGatr, a little excitement is fine, but it’s hard for me to get excited when I don’t know what’s happening in the game, because Milo is unwilling or incapable of describing it!
May 11th, 2008 at 8:34 am
I couldn’t agree more with Lisa about Vince and the self-absorbed talkers who rattle on & on without telling you what’s happening on the field. I loved Gene Elston - he was not only a great play-by-play announcer buif a sterling person. I turn off the sound when some of the blabbermouths come on.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I always listen to Vin Scully and Bob Uecker whenver the Astros play them. It’s a joy to listen to Uecker as much as we can. Even his sausage commercials are great.
~Astros Kimm
www.astroskimm.com
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