The voice of our youth

A sports fan spends enough summers growing up, and growing middle-aged, in Southern California, and he starts to lose things.

His innocence.

His annual sojourn to the Lakers’ championship parade.

His dream of one day quarterbacking the Rams.

The Rams.

The Raiders too.

Summer can be cruel for sports fans seeking a little comfort in consistency, a little solace in stability. Everything changes so quickly here. Kobe Bryant: beloved one summer, hated the next, hailed as a 50-point scorer in Game 6, disparaged as a quitter in Game 7.

Local sports talk radio doesn’t help, not when the working standard is: Forget yesterday, forget tomorrow, shout out the first thing that enters your head today and stick with it, at least until the next commercial.

Fortunately, the radio dial has a lot of numbers. Keep moving and eventually you will rediscover the voice of your youth, the soundtrack of your most celebrated summers, the narrative link from Koufax to Karros to Kent (not to mention Farmer John sausage links), Vin Scully.

If Reggie Jackson was Mr. October, Scully owns April through September. Since the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn in 1958, Scully has been the one constant through the calm collectedness of Walter Alston’s managerial tenure, Tom Lasorda’s bellicose braying and the blindfolded dart-toss approach to franchise stewardship by Frank and Jamie McCourt.

In fact, Scully has become even more important to the Dodgers in these uncertain times at Chavez Ravine, when anything and everything seemingly can change at the drop of a bat -- managers, general managers, division-winning rosters, uniform exteriors, stadium interiors.

I’m still not sure why Jim Tracy is managing in Pittsburgh, and Shawn Green still looks strange in an Arizona Diamondback cap, but at least we still have Vinny.

Listen to Scully today and then replay his most famous calls of yesteryear -- Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series home run (“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”), Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game (“Two and two to Harvey Kuenn “).

The tenor remains the same. The cadence is unchanged. Time stands still when you listen to Scully. On a summer day in 2006, you can tune into a Dodger game and Scully will melodically take you back to afternoons spent playing ping-pong in your parents’ garage, to games of catch interrupted by a station wagon lumbering down the block, to backyard barbecues gone silent as Ron Cey stepped up to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the ninth.

The most significant move of the Dodgers’ most recent off-season was not the hiring of Manager Grady Little or the signing of Nomar Garciaparra to play first base. It was the February announcement that the 78-year-

old Scully, now in his 57th season as Dodger broadcaster, had agreed to a contract extension through 2008.

That gives Los Angeles at least three more summers to pull up a chair alongside Uncle Vin. Although his career to this point has defied the notion, nothing lasts forever, and this is a sobering time for fans of great sportscasting. The Lakers lost Chick Hearn. Ernie Harwell retired from the Tigers. Keith Jackson re-retired from college football. Pat Summerall no longer is the voice of pro football.

But Scully remains perched behind his microphone at Dodger Stadium, the greatest baseball broadcaster who ever lived still on top of his game after nearly six decades.

Enjoy him while you can.

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Columnist Mike Penner gets paid to watch sports, but he’d listen to Vin Scully for free.

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Dialing in Vin

Vin-tage: Want to relive a 9-minute snippet of the Sandy Koufax perfect game of 1965? How about an hour of Orel Hershiser’s consecutive scoreless innings record, set in 1988 against the Padres? Those and more are at the Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Free, but a donation is suggested. (310) 786-1025, www.mtr.org

Quotable: Baseball Almanac.com has an excellent collection of Scully quotations, including the transcript of the ninth inning of Koufax’s perfect game. www.baseball-almanac.com/quotes/vin_scully_quotes.shtml

Hear him now: Catch Scully on KFWB-AM (980). He does about 115 games a season.