I'm sure Vin Scully hears the question constantly, and I'm equally sure he always handles it with his characteristic grace.
It's a question without a definite answer. How long will the fans of Southern California, spoiled beyond recognition by his elegant play-by-play descriptions, continue to enjoy his presence in the Los Angeles Dodgers TV booth?
"I'm happy (with) what I'm doing right now," he said over the weekend. "I'm not sure how long I'm going to do it. And I am going one year at a time. And the McCourts are very understanding. They're not saying, 'Well, are you or aren't you?' So I'm just doing my thing. And we'll see."
It is wise at this point to grab as much Vinny as you can. Enjoy it. Savor it. Record it and set it aside for posterity, even.
At 81, in his 60th year of broadcasting Dodgers baseball, Scully is the last of a breed, the announcer inextricably linked with his team. Even with network assignments for CBS and NBC in the 1970s and '80s, he remained identified with the club that hired him as a 21-year-old out of Fordham in 1950.
He's the last of a breed in another sense, too, continuing to work solo. To those who have grown up accustomed to multiple voices in the booth and might consider this an anachronism, I respond: Why would you rather have two guys gabbing with each other instead of one talking directly to you, the listener?
During the Dodgers' last road trip, they were winning a game handily in New York. The television "B" team, Eric Collins and Steve Lyons -- who work the games east of the Rockies -- spent the final innings ruminating about character actor Oliver Platt's presence in a front row seat.
And I couldn't help thinking that if Scully were there, he'd have been talking instead about the Jackie Robinson Rotunda in the Mets' new Citi Field and following up with stories about the man himself, stories that would have had credibility because he was there.
Besides, Scully said, there's a perfectly good reason why he thinks one man in the booth works best.
"If I wanted to sell this man a car, would it be more effective for me to talk directly to him about how good that car is?" he asked. "Or do I talk to you about how good the car is and he listens to the conversation? Well, I think you'd agree, head-on, one on one is better.
"Local broadcasters, you're trying to get people in here. Therefore, you're selling your team, one on one ... In my mind, (teams) might have given up something by doing a local broadcast like a network game. I don't think it works."
Scully sold this team, and this game, to Southern California from the moment the Dodgers arrived in 1958, even though -- with his characteristic modesty and humility -- he insisted it was the medium that mattered, not the messenger.
"The people needed the radio. They didn't need me," he said. "They needed whoever was on, and I never forgot that. But the (transistor) radio was the biggest help for us, to make us closer to the fans because they were all listening. And it made you bear down, because if you made a mistake, they were all looking at it."
Still, for as long as Scully continued to do seven innings of radio every night at home -- into the early part of this decade, in fact -- fans brought their portable radios to Dodger Stadium to hear Scully describe what they were seeing. So in retrospect, it was the messenger after all.
The Southern California region has been blessed through the years. It could have its own wing of the Broadcasting Hall of Fame featuring Scully, the Lakers' Chick Hearn, the Angels and Rams' Dick Enberg, the Kings' Bob Miller and (briefly) the Raiders' Bill King, each icons in their respective sports. The bar has been set high here.
Yet even in that fivesome, Scully occupies a singular place. Yes, even above the beloved Hearn.
Scully is not only the voice of the Dodgers, he is their soul. He is the last link to the Brooklyn years, but he's also one of the few club employees left from the O'Malley era, which ended only 11 years ago but seems far more distant.
And I'd make the case that Scully's immense credibility, the product of Red Barber's instruction all those years ago to report and not root, probably did more than anything to help the Dodgers franchise get through the frequent turbulence of the Fox and McCourt years.
How do you replace that? I'm not sure you can.
Hopefully, that day isn't close.
"I just know that right now, I'm still thrilled doing the games," Scully said. "To me, I guess the thermometer would be goose bumps. When there's a big play and the crowd roars, I still get the goose bumps. And when I do, I think, 'Wow, I still love it.'"
So do we, Vin. So do we.
(Contact Jim Alexander jalexander@PE.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
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