DYK: Scully has seen it all during his tenure

Sunday afternoon will mark one of baseball’s most heartfelt goodbyes and the end of an era when legendary broadcaster Vin Scully will call his final game. As the voice of the Dodgers for 67 consecutive years — a run unmatched in baseball as well as any professional sport — Scully’s consistency, grace and, most of all, talent leaves behind a legacy that will likely go unchallenged in the broadcasting ranks for generations to come.

The sheer amount of time and games (which surely number in the tens of thousands) that Scully has seen and spent in baseball can boggle the mind — especially when you consider that the luminaries he first watched and spoke to when he debuted on WMGM radio back in 1950 likely leaves him (and, through his stories, all of us) perhaps only one or two degrees separated from the very origins of professional baseball. For an idea of just how much change Scully has seen in the game and, indeed, the world, since we first heard his voice on the air, consider the following (all stats through Monday’s games):

• The Major Leagues featured just 16 teams in Scully’s debut 1950 season. Six of those clubs (Athletics, Braves, Browns, Dodgers Giants, Senators) would eventually move to new cities during Scully’s tenure. Two of them (Browns, Senators) went on to change their name completely, and another two (Athletics, Braves) would actually move twice during the time Scully called games.

Of the 14 ballparks that hosted big league games in 1950, only two remain standing and still host their teams: Wrigley Field and Fenway Park.

• Scully began as a radio voice, of course, well before he began calling World Series games for NBC in the 1980s and manning Dodgers games on regional television, as he does now. The first televised Major League game was broadcast in 1939 — 11 years before Scully’s debut — with his mentor Red Barber making the call. The World Series would not receive its first coast-to-coast television treatment until 1951, setting the stage for Scully to call a record 25 Fall Classics.

• In 1950, the Brooklyn Dodgers placed sixth in Major League attendance, drawing a total of nearly 1,186,000 fans — about one-third of the team’s projected attendance in 2016, which finished at 3,703,312.

• A meteoric rise in player salary has accompanied those expanded gate receipts and television revenues. According to the Society for Baseball Research (SABR), the highest paid player in Scully’s debut 1950 season was the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio, who earned a cool $100,000. While that figure would place DiMaggio among the social elite in his day, it equals just 0.3 percent of the …

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