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Sam Miller at Baseball Prospectus website has logged how many times Vin Scully has told the same story abut Giants catcher Buster Posey in the last four years. The most recurring anecdote has come up eleven times. Some others as many as nine or ten. There are actually quite a few repeats, but en masse just a heck of a lot of material you don't get from most announcers. And that's just one young player, on just one of the Dodgers' opposing teams.
Scully's notes should go to the Baseball Hall of Fame when he's done with them, if not to the Smithsonian. Writes Miller:
Vin Scully’s factoids might seem, oh, repetitive and occasionally arbitrary, but they are actually a very important part of humanity’s future. There will come a day when all the paper dissolves, and there will come a day when Stuxnet erases all of our digital documentation, but there will never come a day when Vin Scully isn’t talking about baseball players. He is the only indestructible repository of historical information that mankind has ever created, and he is our only hope of remembering that Rich Aurilia once worked as a stagehand at the Metropolitan Opera.
A critic might accuse Scully of repeating factoids too often, but Scully knows that not everybody listens to every game, and not everybody who does remembers every fact; the frequency of a factoid’s appearance certainly corresponds to its importance in the story. A critic might also suggest that the facts skew toward uniqueness, rather than significance. This is true, but this is also important. There are too many baseball players and too many baseball games. Nothing is significant. Each player is merely a single skin cell, easily scraped away and regenerated with no impact. All we have in baseball to keep us alive is the unique.
Related note: Dodgers blogger Robero Baly, of Vin Scully is my Homeboy, is hospitalized for treatment of a lung infection. He's been there before. Tommy Lasorda tweeted good wishes.
