RIP Vin Scully

Here is a clip of Rick Monday making the announcement. When he started in on something like "Baseball is a game, but we sometimes have to check reality at the gate," I knew bad news was coming and it was likely that Vin died.

Rick Monday Breaks The News Of Vin Scully's Passing - YouTube

 

Costner's tribute was heartfelt...

 

Don't know if he wrote it, but that was incredibly well-written.

 

That is beyond awesome.

 

I think Hank Azaria based his baseball announcer character on Scully and the ability to tell a story and drop in the count and score seamlessly.

And I highly recommend watching “Brockmire” because it’s fantastic.

 

Good God, Kevin, thanks for the scripted stuff,
but step aside while Costas talks some real Scully ...

 

I worked in very small markets, so we really didn’t get earth shattering news…except that one of the sister papers in our hub was the hometown of one of the most famous men to walk the earth…and the moon.

The morning he died, I looked over at our news editor and said, “Have they sent over the obit in a can yet?”

Silence. Horror. That awful simultaneous premonition that this tiny newspaper didn’t have an obit ready to run for the only guy in the town that actually needed an obit pre-written.

“THEY DIDN’T HAVE A NEIL ARMSTRONG OBIT READY?

I bet there was one, but it had been written 30 years prior, put in a desk and thrown away.

The story, with its blaring headline and giant art, had nothing that the AP didn’t, despite all the resources — including the fucking museum — to write the story unlike any other source.

It was a failure of such proportions.

 

I see it a lot in local papers these days, someone of note passes and nobody at the paper was around when the person was a big deal, most of the person's contemporaries are gone, maybe you get lucky and have a good archive you can cobble together some stuff - so much better to have the pre-written obit by someone who "knew" the person, a good long interview to draw on. Who cares if you have to slap a byline from someone who is no longer there, or even deceased.

 

How hard is it to write a fresh obit? Having one 'ready to go' is not really the point.

 

Depends where we’re talking.

At a small community newspaper with a bunch of reporters fresh out of college making $12 an hour, no one was equipped to write a history-changing figure’s obit in two hours.