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Particularly for the Dodgers and their fans — especially their long-time fans, who heard Vinny at his peak. (I started listening to Dodgers games on radio in 1965, when powerhouse KFI could be heard as far north as San Francisco.)
But that peak is past, and it's time.
Last season, I began to eagerly await the fourth inning, when Charlie Steiner and Rick Monday took over the radio booth. I'd heard most of Vinny's stories more than once — though, somehow, he kept coming up with new ones — and by then, his age had begun to tell. He repeated himself. He mispronounced words. Mostly, the endless bits o' player tid he passed along were... well, boring.
I much prefer old-school baseball broadcasters to the 21st-century variety, who seem at least partly born of sports-talk radio, trying to impress and amuse themselves and their cohorts rather than call a ball game. But Vinny has become too old-school for my tastes, perhaps because of his conservative bent and because he's been doing this since 1950. The older we become, the more we revert to our old ways, and I always feel when listening to Vinny that he wishes he were back in 1965.
He is, arguably, the best there ever was, and he's most assuredly a legend. We're always diminished by the loss of a legend, and the tributes to him should be, in one of his favorite adjectives, glorious. He deserves that. He's earned it, many times over.
But, it's time.
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