SCULLY ADEPT AT ADAPTING; SPORTSCASTER STAYS CALM AMID HOOPLA.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH The Media

During the past 50 years, those promoters and networks who run baseball have tried to improve the game. It's been an all-out assault on the senses.

The broadcasts use more mini cameras, louder whirling graphics, microphones crammed into anything that's not moving, and ad nauseam replays. The stadiums have become carnival grounds where a game happens to be taking place.

And let's not even get started on Beanie Babies.

But then there's Vin Scully, like a candle, somehow bringing a sense of calm to everything.

You'd think it'd be the other way around: Baseball should move toward preserving its past rather than tweaking its future.

Not really, says Scully, who begins his second half-century not with just the same sport but with the same team. As much as he is a link to the past, he wants to have a future in the game.

``What I've noticed is something that looks like an out-and-out appeal - a drive if you will - to get young fans,'' the Dodgers' Hall of Fame play-by-play man said. ``And today's youngsters, I guess studies have shown they have the attention span of 30 seconds with the combination of push-button radio and remote control. And they love noise - the louder the better.

``And in ballparks all over the country, they play the most raucous rock and roll - even when the park is empty. Naturally, when you're in the marketing business or controlling a network, you know you've got the older people, but you also want the young ones. So you make it loud - crash, boom, bam. . . .''

Scully paused as only Scully can do - to make the story better and to stop himself from sounding like some crotchety baseball fan pining for the good old days. He broke into a huge smile.

``So if that's what kids want and it brings young fans in, go to it. And I just go with the flow. Maybe I don't like all the pizzaz. But I understand, or at least I think I do. I would feel much worse if they changed the game. But the packaging, the wrapping . . . that's another story.

``I guess the secret for me has been to accept the change. Yesterday is gone. Just like all those years at Vero Beach (the Dodgers' spring-training site in Florida). That's where I connect to this team so much more than in any other way. But it's yesterday. They can always move the pictures to a new place. You have to keep adjusting to change.''

In the beginning, sharing a press-box microphone with Red Barber and Connie Desmond, there was this 22-year-old still living with his mom, step-dad and sister in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the Bronx. He was a year out of Fordham University (also in that borough).

Scully had been hired just months earlier by Branch Rickey to replace Ernie Harwell, who moved across town to call games for the New York Giants. Barber recommended Scully based on a Maryland-Boston College football game Vin did for CBS Radio while freezing on the roof of Fenway Park.

On April 18, 1950, the Brooklyn Dodgers opened the season with a 9-1 loss at Ebbets Field to the Philadelphia Phillies. Robin Roberts pitched a complete game against Don Newcombe, who came out after the second inning. Jackie Robinson batted cleanup and played second base.

Scully admits he remembers nothing from the game he broadcast over WHM in New York.

``I was thoroughly intimidated and scared to death,'' is the best his mind can do for him. ``My attitude then was I'd go to ballpark like a bad hitter who was going up to the plate saying, `I don't want to strike out,' rather than `Get a base hit.' I was thinking, `God, please don't let me make a mistake.' ''

Early in his career, Scully was as much a TV broadcaster as a radio man. In 1950, the Dodgers did all 77 home games for WPIX-Channel 11. A few seasons later, they added 25 road games.

And after Game 6 of the 1954 World Series, Scully found himself really on his own - Barber, upset over how little money he received for doing the Series, went to work for the New York Yankees with Mel Allen.

Then came the move to Los Angeles in '58 and the boom of transistor radios from fans who brought them to games at the Coliseum to help them follow what was going on way down on the field. It became Scully's medium.

He not only introduced an entire city to big-league baseball, but he had a captive audience - so much so that when the team moved over to Dodger Stadium, owner Walter O'Malley didn't put any home games on TV for years.

Scully has come a long way to his 50th season - a family-owned team now a Fox-owned team that will be on TV home and away more than 130 times in 1999. Scully will do as many of those games as he can handle, and you'll hear less and less of him on the radio.

That's progress?

It's an adjustment that others of his era have had to make, moving from radio, which was the dominant medium, to another, television, to the cusp of another, the Internet, to broadcast the sport.

Like everyone, Scully, 72, marvels at how octogenarian Chick Hearn has made it through it all to be doing games for the Lakers in his 38th year with the team.

``He obviously loves it and it obviously makes him happy,'' Scully said of Hearn, trying to figure out his secret for longevity.

``I've always felt a man's job almost - almost - is the man. There's so-and-so the doctor, or the lawyer . . . it's so much a part of you. I think when you give it up, you lose something maybe not in the public eye, but your own self worth is challenged.

``I know I don't like the idea of playing golf every day. I found that out during the strike of '94. That's when I knew I couldn't just walk away from this.''

With no guarantee of calling Dodgers games for another 50 years, what will Scully be doing five or 10 years from now? His current contract keeps him here three more years, through 2001.

``After that, it's a question. . . . I mean, as long as I enjoy it and I'm healthy enough to do the job, the enthusiam is honest, the crowd roar brings the goose bumps, I'll probably keep doing it.

``I'd hate to turn the engine off after all these years.''

Scully paused again.

``It's that old story: If you want to make God smile, tell him your plans.''

SOUND BYTES

By Tom Hoffarth E-mail: sptmediaaol.com

WHAT SMOKES

The History Channel - that's up the cable menu between ESPN and MTV, grouped with the other channels that make you think - has sneaked in a block of sports stuff tonight worthy of more than just a yawn and a click over to the Lakers game. Start with ``Golf: Links in Time'' (6 p.m.), a two-hour documentary on the sport. Next, the episode of ``Modern Marvels'' (8 p.m.) is a look at how sports technology has advanced. Then on ``In Search of History'' (9 p.m.), it's a review of the first Olympic Games. The three-show cycle repeats at 10 p.m.

ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball telecast, which this week features the first of two straight appearances by the Disney Angels, will break out a new version of ``Bat Track.'' It's the graphic inspired by Joe Morgan that shows viewers how the immediate bat speed and its relationship to pitch speed results in putting the ball in play. By the way, ESPN plans for later this season include a strike-zone graphic that'll attempt to provide with even more precision how a pitch is a ball or strike based on the rule book. The umps will love that one.

An episode of ``The Simpsons'' re-airs tonight (Channel 11, 6:30 p.m.) that's got to be sports time-capsule material - remember the one when Mr. Burns uses big-league ringers on the company softball team, and Darryl Strawberry, Wade Boggs and Mike Scioscia lend their voices? And Strawberry cries when the fans taunt him? And . . . aw, just watch it. Again.

WHAT CHOKES

Those new Dodgers home-game starting times - 7:10 p.m. instead of 7:05 p.m. and 1:10 p.m. instead of 1:05 p.m. - have absolutely nothing to do with cramming a few more commercials in on the front side of the TV telecast.

And as for why the Dodgers are playing an odd-start 4:35 p.m. Saturday - Fox Sports West 2 already had the Clippers-Portland game locked into the 7:30 p.m. hole, so in order to televise the game, the early start was necessary. Yup, the Dodgers are bumped for the Clippers.

How does a Dodgers exhibition game draw a better rating than the season opener?

There are approximately 547 TV sportscasters who you could at one time or another believe were capable of fabricating a story/twisting the truth/pumping up an otherwise dull yarn to draw attention to their network. Fox Sports News anchor Keith Olbermann isn't one of them.

Sean McDonough on the 16th hole.

It's unfortunate KTLA Channel 5's Stu Nahan (yeah, we thought he was retired, too) feels he needs to spend good quality advertising-supported airtime to tell newspaper editors who to hire to cover their beats. On the other hand, most of the city never saw ``A Moment With Stu'' last Sunday in the first place, or will watch this Sunday when he says he's going to apologize. By the way, nice jacket, Stu.

WHAT SMOKED ON LOCAL TV

The top 10 Nielsen-rated sports events (with their share numbers) on L.A. television from April 1-7:

Event Date Station Rt/Sh.x

NBA: Lakers at Sacramento 4/7 KCAL  8.8/13

NBA: Lakers at Phoenix 4/2 KCAL 6.2/12

NBA: Utah at Lakers 4/6 FSW 6.0/9

MLB: NY Yankees at Dodgers 4/3 KTLA 5.3/10

MLB: Cleveland at Angels 4/6 KCAL 4.6/7

NBA: Denver at Lakers 4/5 FSW 4.3/8

NBA: Houston at Seattle 4/4 KNBC  4.3/13

MLB: Arizona at Dodgers 4/5 KTLA 4.3/12

NBA: Golden State at Lakers 4/3 FSW 4.3/8

MLB: NY Yankees at Dodgers 4/4 KTLA 3.8/12

Note: Lakers-Phoenix game on 4/2 with Marv Albert doing play-by-play on TNT did a 1.3/3.

x -One rating point equals 50,092 TV homes in Los Angeles; a share is the percentage of all the TV sets in use at that time.

CAPTION(S):

Photo, 2 Boxes

Photo: (Color) The voice of the Dodgers for his 50th season, Vin Scully throws out the first ball on Monday's.

Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press

Box: (1) SOUND BYTES (See text)

(2) WHAT SMOKED ON LOCAL TV (See text)