Ten Baseball Things We’re Thankful For This Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is upon us, a time of family and friends and turkey and stuffing and fall leaves and one of America’s vastly inferior sports, football. Baseball season, sadly, is on its annual winter hiatus but even still, there are things baseball fans should be thankful for.

Here at OTBB, we’ve compiled our list of the Ten Baseball Things We’re Thankful For This Thanksgiving:

1. Vin Scully

Earlier this week, Scully was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to the very fabric of the game. He was baseball for a great number of Dodger’s fans and his send off this year was beautiful in every aspect. We’ve written about Scully many times here on Off The Bench, but this from Max before the year was the most poignant:

88 year old Vin Scully has been calling Dodger games since 1950, 67 years. For context, when Scully first started working play by play for the Dodgers in Brooklyn, Dwight Eisenhower had just taken office as President of the United States, Bill Clinton was 4 years old, John Kennedy was two years from becoming a US Senator, and Barack Obama wouldn’t be born for 11 years. But its certainly not his remarkable longevity that makes Scully a legend. It is the fact that he is, objectively and unequivocally, the best sports announcer there has been and the best there will ever be. He is the only man to still work games alone, carrying the entire weight of both TV and radio broadcasts simultaneously while telling stories of the players that only he could possibly know. How, after nearly 70 seasons and thousands and thousands of players he can still remember the details of individual players lives and weave them so effortlessly into a broadcast is amazing.

There is no one like Vin Scully. If baseball is the soundtrack of summer, Scully is the soundtrack of baseball. 2016 will be his final season in the booth before a well deserved retirement. Soak up as much as you can.

2. David Ortiz

Similarly, David Ortiz announced his retirement before the year started.

To continue reading about baseball things to be thankful for, please click on over to offthebenchbaseball.com.