Snarking on baseball broadcasters is a sport within a sport. But everyone loves Vin Scully – Los Angeles Times

The modern baseball broadcaster provides a public service to sports fans everywhere: He receives our hatred; he’s a magnet, or a receptacle, for our frustration. To talk for three-plus hours extemporaneously, particularly during a game as leisurely and mannered as baseball, is to invite listeners to pounce on every poorly researched remark. Each year the baseball site Fangraphs.com asks its readers to rank all 30 teams’ announcers; perhaps the nicest thing written about one was that he was “phlegmatic to a fault.” Snarking on broadcasters is a fan’s sport within a sport.

The rise of hate-listening tracks the decline of the Big Broadcast Personality. Today, baseball announcers pretty much sound the same. John, Dave, Tom, Marty, Joe, Jack, Dan … They are interchangeable and anonymous: Choosing one over another would be like choosing between brands of paper clips.

There are, of course, a few grandfathered-in exceptions to the bland-yet-hated rule: Hawk Harrelson in Chicago, Mike Shannon in St. Louis—and most exceptional of all: Vin.

Vin Scully, who now enters his final month on the job, began broadcasting for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950 as an apprentice to Red Barber. Three years later, he was the team’s lead broadcaster. By 1958, when the team moved to Los Angeles to play in the Coliseum, he was so vital to fans – many of whom had difficulty following the game in a stadium far too massive for it – that they packed transistor radios so they could listen to Vin in the stands. By 1976, fans elected him the “most memorable personality” in Dodgers history. That was 40 years ago.