The Voice of Baseball, moving on

The silence, needless to say, will be deafening ...

I wrote that six years ago, when Vin Scully slid behind the mike for the final time. And today the silence is deafening. 

Vin passed last night at 94, and if you don't take your radio out to the patio tonight to listen to a baseball game in his honor, you have not an ounce of sentiment within you.

Baseball, after all, is radio's game, and Vin Scully was its narrator of narrators. And because I cannot say it better than I did then, here's the rest of what I wrote six years ago, updated for the present day:

... if there is a singular Voice of Baseball he is it, if not the voice of an entire American epoch. When he began calling Dodgers games, Jackie Robinson was still playing, Dem Bums still played in Ebbets Field and Harry Truman was president. The Korean War hadn't happened yet. Vietnam hadn't. And the current president, 79 now, was an 8-year-old kid in Scranton, Pa., listening to ballgames on the radio himself.

Now Ebbets Field is long gone, and Jackie is, and whatever passed for both American innocence and American civility has vanished. Buffoons and lunatics vie for Harry Truman's office now. Demagoguery is celebrated rather than hooted back to the dark corners where it belongs. And through it all, Vin Scully called balls and strikes and evoked endless summer, having outlasted 11 presidents and the Soviet Union and responsible discourse in American politics -- but not, alas, racial inequality, divide-and-conquer fear-mongering and the unceasing drumbeat of war.

Here's something else Vin Scully didn't outlast, thankfully: The notion that for all the technological advancement in presenting the game, baseball's best medium remains radio.

It is a game the mind's eye has always seen clearest, and it is the Vin Scullys who have always been its best guides. The porch-swing rhythms of the game are perfectly paired with the porch-swing rhythms of those voices murmuring from the radio on a summer afternoon or night. They are the voices we fell asleep to, the voices we listened to on the sly on October afternoons, transistor radios tucked away from the prying eyes of the commandant at the front of the classroom.

Vin Scully was that voice then if you were a Dodgers fan, and for 67 years he remained that voice. He is the bridge that spans Jackie and Mookie Betts, the connective tissue that binds Carl Erskine to Sandy Koufax to Fernando Valenzuela to Clayton Kershaw. He is the background music that played while America went from Korea to Vietnam to the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the towers on 9/11.

Vin Scully's journey spanned all of that. What he saw, from his perch high above the changeless geometry of the diamond, very few people have been privileged to see.  And when he signed off in 2016 for the last time, entire eras of history signed off with him.

The silence, needless to say, was deafening.