LOS ANGELES -- Habits are formed easily in baseball.

Spend any time around the game, and your daily routine sort of comes together organically, without your even realizing it. The clubhouse opens to the media at the same time every day, and the manager meets with reporters at the same time every day. Same with batting practice. And so, by extension, you eventually find yourself going to bed around the same time every night, getting up around the same time every morning, doing pretty much the same things every day before coming to the ballpark.

Vin Scully, the play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, announced he'll return for his 63rd year. AP Photo/Nick Ut

Sixty-two seasons in the broadcast booth has a way of cementing those routines. Thanks to that, Vin Scully's nightly routine has intersected with mine on countless occasions over the past few years, and that is something for which I will forever be grateful.

Every night, when the last pregame news story has been filed and the starting lineups have been entered by hand into the scorebook, a handful of us kill the final half-hour or so before the game by gathering around a large table in the press-box cafeteria and scarfing down a quick dinner. On most nights, at some point during that meal, Scully will emerge from the executive dining room in the back and, with a few minutes to spare, pull up a chair at our table and regale us with a story, never the same one twice.

And then -- his sense of timing as impeccable as ever -- just before he is due to go on the air, the legendary play-by-play voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers will scoot his chair back from the table, say something to the effect of "Well, duty calls," and off he will go.

I missed out on this ritual before Friday night's game, in which the Dodgers scored six runs in the bottom of the seventh inning to steal a 6-1 victory over the Colorado Rockies in front of 38,960 at Dodger Stadium and Matt Kemp became the second player in franchise history to go 30/30. I was late for dinner and the table was full, but there was Vinnie, as always, standing over everyone with a big smile on his face and a good story flowing from his lips.

During the game, though, I learned that there will be plenty more chances to hear these stories, because Scully announced on the air in the fifth inning that he has decided to return to the booth for a 63rd season in 2012. It was a simple declaration, really, one he began by holding up a couple of chocolate-chip cookies and, of course, telling a short story about them, that story ending with Scully saying he was going to hang around for another year.

He didn't even wait to find out the results of that ridiculous survey the Dodgers sent to some of their season-ticket holders asking them to rate the team's announcers.