Tagged: Vin Scully

Stay Busy

Perhaps because I am a stereotypical Cancer, an overly emotional, empathetic, and moody person, I was brought to tears reading the story of Jamie Jarrín, the Dodgers, Spanish-language announcer, whose wife died earlier this year.

When Vin Scully retired from broadcasting Dodgers games after the 2016 season, he was rightly celebrated perhaps the best announcer in the history of US sports. Part of his legend was his longevity: he has started calling Dodgers games in 1950. But what most people likely don’t know off-hand is that the Dodgers still have an announcer that has been calling games since 1959. If Jarrín keeps working for another six years, he will pass Scully as the Dodgers longest tenured announcer.

Jarrín had planned to broadcast only a few games this season as he wanted to spend most of his time with his wife. But after she suddenly died, he asked the Dodgers to return to full-time duties, including traveling with the team on their long and grueling road trips. Although that sounds stressful, especially to an eighty-three year old man, it is common knowledge that only time can heal emotional wounds, and that to overcome such grief, it is necessary to stay busy. I can imagine it would be much worse to be alone in the house he shared with his wife.

Scully Appreciation Society

Before the home opener at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday, the team paid tribute to Vin Scully by replaying some of the most memorable calls of his 67-year tenure as the Dodger’s broadcast announcer. The fifteen-minute–long tribute included the players from those moments, including Sandy Koufax, three-quarters of the celebrated 1970s Dodgers infield, a video tribute from Kirk Gibson, and even Don Newcombe. The now eighty-nine year–old Newcombe who was Brooklyn’s starting pitcher at Scully’s first Dodger’s game assignment.1

As Scully gets closer to calling his final game this year, there will undoubtedly be more tributes such as these. But perhaps the best tribute to his career is the nearly–5000-word biographical article Greg King wrote for SABR.

As King notes, it is Scully—not Koufax or Kershaw— who is clearly the “greatest left hander” in Dodger history.

  1. I would embed the video, but, inexplicably, MLB does not support HTTPS embeds. ↩

Going Dutch

Last Thursday night, I was watching the LA feed of the Dodgers-Phillies game in Los Angeles. As is the case with all Dodgers home games, Vin Scully was calling the game. In the sixth inning, the Philadelphia pitcher Severino Gonzales was struggling with his control and walked Andre Eithier. After the walk, the Phillies catcher jumps out of his crouch and jogs to the pitching mound to calm his pitcher. Vin Scully colorfully narrated the mound visit, saying, “and Cameron Rupp goes out there like a Dutch uncle to talk to him.”

What on earth is a dutch uncle?

Many, many years ago, the renown film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, who is an Englishman with a post at the University of Amsterdam, visited NYU. At a large dinner held in his honor, he told me that the English have at least one-hundred expressions that are derogatory to the Dutch. He offered this pearl of wisdom after I jokingly asked Elsaesser whether we were each “going dutch” as we were presented the check, although I believe NYU ultimately paid for the dinner.

The many derogatory expressions makes sense considering England and the Netherlands are neighboring countries, separated by the North Sea, who fought a series of wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over trade routes and imperialism. It’s no secret that the people in one nation generally take a degrading view towards their neighbors. Consider the American expression Canadian tuxedo and the countless things people in the southwest say about Mexicans.

To the English, a dutch uncle is someone who advises by admonishment. It is, as the Wikipedia entry succinctly puts it, the opposite of someone who is “avuncular or uncle-like.”

This, of course, begs the question of the other English-language expressions that demean the Dutch. Sjoerd Mullender, a programmer at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam has compiled a list of English-language expressions featuring the Dutch. As he points out, most of these phrases are “unfavourable” to the Dutch.

Some of these I already knew, such as…

  • dutch angle: In cinematography, framing at an unconventional, titled angle. I figured it was shorthand for a “weird” angle.
  • dutch courage: Newly found courage after a few drinks.
  • going dutch: Making everyone pay for their own meal. It is related to the term “dutch treat,” which Mullender notes is “not a treat at all.”
  • dutch oven: Something used for cooking. But I was most familiar with the definition Mullender describes as “a prank where one farts under a blanket while holding a victim there.”

But, of course, there are many others that are truly eyebrow-raising, such as…

  • dutch act: suicide
  • dutch generosity: stinginess
  • dutch headache: a hangover
  • dutch widow: a prostitute
  • dutch concert: A great noise and uproar, like that made by a party of drunken Dutchmen, some singing, others quarreling, speechifying, etc.

Read the whole list on Mullender’s website and try not to think about the even worse expressions the English have for the Irish. And vice-versa.