Five years ago, a dozen friends and I headed from Los Angeles to San Diego to catch a three-game series between the Dodgers and the Padres. The stated purpose of the trip was a bachelor party for an old friend, but we needed little excuse to follow our home team on the road. When we checked into our hotel, we realized just how closely we had followed them; the Dodgers were staying there, too. This was a little like running into your calculus teacher at the mall. These people aren’t supposed to exist in real life. Excited, we filled out bingo cards with player sightings. But really, we wanted to see only one man: Vin Scully, the team’s announcer since Harry Truman was in office.

One morning, Jon, the groom ­to ­be, walked into a hotel elevator and found himself eyeball to eyeball with Scully. Jon introduced himself, explained the purpose of his visit and asked if he had any advice. After a thoughtful pause, Scully said, in his dulcet New York drawl, ‘‘Ahh, marriage — man’s most optimistic of endeavors.’’ He wished Jon luck, and that was it. Elevator doors opened, folk hero exited. The encounter set our close-knit group aflame. We pulled our liberal-­arts degrees out of their moldering mental storage and began analyzing Scully’s line like the poetry it was, a classic Scullyism — the lyricism, the slightly antique syntax, the dueling notes of mischief and joy.

It may seem odd to feel such devotion to an octogenarian baseball announcer, but Scully is a singular figure. He stands apart from today’s broadcasters, who, with a few notable exceptions, are awful. Largely ex-pros recounting their faded glories and AM radio graduates, they gab in the second ­person as they chew through clichés. Often they offer nothing approaching an insight or a surprising thought for three whole hours — or more. This is perhaps a byproduct of their shifting job description. Once, sportscasters existed for the benefit of people who were listening on radio and would never see the action. They were still necessary in the early days of TV, but the introduction of advanced statistics, on-­screen graphics and instant replay have rendered sportscasters almost redundant. My study isn’t empirical, but I have spent several years streaming the MLB TV package into my frontal lobe, and most games are better enjoyed on mute.