Baseball notebook: Scully heads into final week behind mic at Dodger Stadium

As an 8-year-old in the Bronx, Vin Scully would grab a pillow, put it under his family’s four-legged radio and lay his head directly under the speaker to hear whatever college football game was on the air in 1936.

With a snack of saltine crackers and a glass of milk nearby, the red-haired boy was transfixed by crowd’s roar that raised goosebumps. He thought about how much he’d like to be at the game. As time went on, he thought he’d like to call the action himself.

His youthful aspirations came true at 22 when he was hired by a CBS radio affiliate in Washington, D.C. The following year, he joined Red Barber and Connie Desmond in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ radio and television booths. In 1953, at age 25, Scully became the youngest person to broadcast a World Series game, a mark that still stands.

Now 88, Scully is heading into his final week behind the mic at Dodger Stadium before concluding his career on Oct. 2 in San Francisco, where the Dodgers end the regular season against the rival Giants. His 67 years with the Dodgers make Scully the longest-tenured broadcaster with a single team in professional sports.

“I will miss it,” he said Monday. “I know that dramatically.”

Scully discovered his lifelong love of baseball walking home from grade school. He passed a Chinese laundromat and saw the score from Game 2 of the 1936 World Series: Yankees 18, Giants 4.

“My first reaction was, `Poor Giants,“’ he recalled, noting he lived near the team’s home at the Polo Grounds and attended many games for free after school. “That’s when I fell in love with baseball and became a true fan.”

Fittingly, his last game will be 80 years to the day he saw that score in the window.

“It seems like the plan was laid out for me and all I had to do was follow the instructions,” Scully said.

Has he ever.

Though the years, Scully has entranced generations of baseball fans with his dulcet tones as he spins stories about the game and its players while working alone on the air. He still relishes the crowd’s cheers, a sound he says is “like water out of a showerhead.”

Scully credits the birth of the transistor radio as “the greatest single break” of his career. In 1958, he accompanied the Dodgers when the franchise relocated to Los Angeles. Fans had trouble recognizing the lesser players during the team’s first four years in the vast Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

“They were 70 or so odd rows away from the action,” he said. “They brought the radio to find out about all the other players and to see what they were trying to see down on the field.”

That habit carried over when the team moved to Dodger Stadium. Fans at the games held radios to their ears and those not present listened from home or the car, allowing Scully to connect generations of families with his words.

“God has been so good to me to allow me to do what I’m doing,” said Scully, a devout Catholic who attends Mass on Sundays before heading to the ballpark. “A childhood dream that came to pass and then giving me 67 years to enjoy every minute of it. That’s a pretty large thanksgiving day for me.”

The Dodgers plan to honor their second-longest tenured employee (behind former manager Tom Lasorda) starting Tuesday night with a Scully bobblehead giveaway.

Friday is an appreciation day for Scully with a pregame ceremony featuring speakers from his career and a postgame fireworks show set to the top calls of his career.

The first 50,000 fans at Saturday’s game against Colorado will receive a limited edition solid bronze coin. On the front is an image of Scully with his signature greeting of “It’s time for Dodger baseball.”

In San Francisco, the Giants will honor Scully at his final game. Two Bay Area TV stations will carry an inning of his broadcast as stations in other cities have done this season.

All the hoopla is “a little embarrassing” to Scully, who reluctantly allowed the Dodgers to rename the street leading to the stadium’s main gate in his honor in April.

“I’ve never wanted to get out in front of the game,” he said.

Scully was adamant about not having an extended farewell. To his surprise and delight, players and managers have come to him. Throughout the season, they’ve made the long trek from the visiting clubhouse in right field to his fifth-floor broadcast booth in the press box named for him, bringing gifts.

“He is just a different human being,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon recently said. “That’s like the window to the world up there, just sitting in his booth. He is really kind and gracious. You have to be all of that to survive that many years and you have to be good.”

At the start of each series, the umpires turn to face Scully’s booth and tip their caps to him.

“I’m deeply touched and overwhelmed with gratitude,” he said.

For the last time at home on Sunday, Scully will open his broadcast with the same reassuring greeting: “Hi everybody, and a very pleasant good afternoon to you wherever you may be.”

“I don’t think I’m going to stress anything about me,” he said. “I will concentrate on Denver as if they’re challenging the Dodgers for first place. I think I’ll be OK.”

When he walks away next month, Scully will go home to his wife, Sandi, and delight in the company of his 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He’ll still watch some baseball because a couple of his grandsons play.

“I’ll try very hard to just stay back and be the very normal guy that I am,” he said. “I just want to be remembered as a good man, an honest man, and one who lived up to his own beliefs.”

Same number, new sport: Tebow works out at Mets camp

Tim Tebow arrived at the New York Mets’ minor league clubhouse in Port St. Lucie, Florida, finding an orange-and-blue jersey with No. 15 on the back swaying in his locker.

He was asked if that worked.

“Heck, yeah,” Tebow replied.

It’s the same color scheme he wore as a national champion and Heisman Trophy winner at Florida, and the same number he wore with the Gators and throughout his less-than-storied years as an NFL quarterback. And now he’s wearing it again as he tries to find a place in baseball, going through his first workout with the Mets’ instructional league squad on Monday.

He showed some power, hitting three balls in batting practice off the chain-link fence in right-center – better than just about everyone else did. He showed some rust, popping up a half-dozen pitches in that same BP session. And he showed a need for work, after one of his throws sailed well over someone’s head and nearly onto an adjacent field during a simple game of catch.

“It was a lot of fun,” Tebow said. “It was great. It was great to be on a team. It was great to just go through a warmup and go through drills, just have fun, take BP, get to know all the guys, try to remember as many names as possible.”

Predictably, it was also a circus atmosphere.

Hundreds of fans – many wearing Tebow jerseys, some even wearing now-on-sale Mets shirts with Tebow’s name – showed up; a worker at the Mets’ complex said instructional league workouts last year drew maybe a couple dozen people, tops. A news helicopter circled over the field where Tebow worked for more than an hour. He got a huge cheer from fans for executing his first official drill, one where he learned how to take a lead off first base.

“Never been here before,” said Sarah Dale, a waitress who works an overnight shift and now says she’ll be a Mets fan. “I’m here for Tim Tebow. … He’s a people person. Everyone loves him.”

Less than a month ago, Tebow was in his native Philippines, working with special-needs and ill children – one of his longtime passions. He’s now one of 58 players on the Mets’ instructional league roster, and at 29 he’s also four years older than any other invitee. Two of the players on the roster won’t even turn 18 until next year.

Tebow’s last time playing true organized baseball was in his junior year of high school, when he batted nearly .500 for Nease High near Jacksonville, Florida. Tebow worked out for scouts in Los Angeles last month and not long afterward the Mets signed him to a deal that included a $100,000 bonus.

“A lot of people would say, `Well, it puts a chip on your shoulder,“’ Tebow said. “I mean, I guess I have a little chip. You want to prove people right. Not really the naysayers, it’s more that I want to prove the coaches right, the Mets organization, my teammates, play with my teammates and try to be the best baseball player I can – more importantly, the best person I can.”

Tebow last appeared in an NFL regular-season game during the 2012 season. He was in camp with the New England Patriots in 2013 and the Philadelphia Eagles in 2015, and started workouts with the thought of seriously trying baseball a few months ago.

He said if the Patriots – who are without Tom Brady for two more games and now have Jimmy Garoppolo dealing with an injury – or any other football team came calling, now they’d get a quick answer.

“I’m part of the Mets family,” Tebow said.

The Mets say Tebow will be part of daily workouts through Thursday. He’ll be excused Friday and Saturday for his college football analyst duties with the SEC Network, and the instructional roster has a day off Sunday.

But Tebow said he plans to work out Friday before leaving for his TV job, saying he’ll probably wind up being gone from camp for only about 24 hours. He’s serious about this pursuit, and insisted that getting to the major leagues is his goal.

“It was one of the hardest decisions of my life to choose football over baseball,” Tebow said. “There were a lot of times at Florida where I thought about going out and starting baseball. And then over the course of the last few years it’s something I’ve thought about a bunch.

“My first sporting activity, I played for the White Sox at Normandy Baseball Park. I didn’t want to put down a bat since.”

The bat – a 34 1/2-inch, 33-ounce maple one, to be precise – is back in his hands again.