At the end of the 1957 baseball season, Brooklyn Dodgers management packed up for a long-threatened move across the continent.
Into the hypothetical moving trunks went the home uniforms saying “Dodgers” across the front, the creaky old heroes of Flatbush and much of the front office, plus Manager Walter Alston and his promising young players. (They were not quite sure whether the young lefty from Brooklyn, Sandy Koufax, would ever harness his velocity.)
Baseball was moving to the Promised Land. The historic New York Giants were also moving, to San Francisco, taking Willie Mays with them. (The noive of them.)
But nothing or nobody in the latter-day covered wagons would transport and transplant baseball to the Left Coast better than a young man not long removed from the Fordham campus in the Bronx and the broadcasting booth in Brooklyn named Vin Scully.
More than anybody or anything, Vin Scully sent baseball floating into the ozone — first from the ill-shaped Coliseum, and then, starting in 1962, from the pastel oasis on a former Mexican camp nestled into Chavez Ravine.
Scully was the warm voice wafting out into a warm climate, instructing the locals in the fine points of big-league baseball. (We sullen, forsaken Dodgers and Giants fans back east liked to think Californians knew nothing about baseball, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams notwithstanding.)
On soft evenings in Chavez Ravine, the common denominator was not crowd noise or public-address announcements but the…
