Hi again everyone ...

and a very pleasant good evening to you, wherever you may be...."

Less than two weeks to go until baseball begins. So to get us all in the mood, I post a link to a wonderful essay by ESPN.com's Eric Neel about the friend of every baseball fan in Southern California, Vin Scully.

My favorite part:

• >> ... Scully, the sound of Scully, is synonymous with Dodgerdom. Whatever else we're doing when we put on a cap or a t-shirt, we're pledging allegiance to Vin. He's who we are.
  That's no doubt true in many major league cities, but it's especially crucial in Los Angeles. It's a vast stretch between the coast and the desert, and thanks in part to a tangle of freeways, a history of water grabs, and great geographical diversity, the L.A. area is a spread-wide place, with communities distanced and often cut off from one another. That's part of the charm of the place, for sure; you get great variety and, at the margins, some fantastic cultural, culinary, and political mélanges. But it comes, too, with a kind of alienated undercurrent, like the city's prone to spin, from time to time, like Yeats' widening gyre, like you're not always sure what connects you to folks on some other spoke of the wheel. I've always felt that Vin counteracts that in some steady, fundamental way.<<