Vin Scully’s Playing a Dodger Dog Flute in Hog Heaven

FAT TV is a bi-monthly column about the intersection of food and television, with words by Richard Parks and illustrations by James Braithwaite.

If you were to head southbound on I-5 during rush hour and toss a wine cork out your car window into the LA River near Chavez Ravine, where the Dodgers play, it'd probably beat your best time down to Vernon, a small incorporated industrial community on the dilapidated edge of East LA. A nowhere town in the midst of some of the city's ugliest sprawl, Vernon plays host to some 112 souls, as well as the local meat-packing business Clougherty Packing LLC — popularly known as Farmer John.

In Vernon, the pigs go in, and the Dodger Dogs® come out. Farmer John has been producing the Dodgers' iconic foot-long wiener at its plant downriver from Dodger Stadium since 1966. That's eight years after the Dodgers moved west from Brooklyn, 35 years after the Clougherty brothers founded their local sausage business, and 16 years after Vincent Edward "Vin" Scully, then 23, first entered the Dodgers broadcast booth to call a game.

Vin Scully is synonymous with televised baseball in Los Angeles, and his wonderfully mellifluous, New York City Irish-immigrant-inflected tenor has been the voice of not just the Dodgers, but also of Farmer John's sausages, bacon, and Dodger Dogs®—available at local stores on a seasonal basis—on TV and radio for the last fifty years. For LA baseball fans, Vin's voice is like a magical Dodger Dog® meat flute, his voice the only song seductive enough to draw us past the whiff of 100-person-capacity public restrooms to stand in line for a mediocre $5 pork wiener couched in a heatlamp-wilted bun and wrapped in blue foil.

Once back in your seat, that dog—the wilted bun, the eau de latrine onions, and cold, unremarkable foot-long pork sausage—is always delicious. Of course it is! Because Vin told you so.

At 87, Vin Scully is, without question, one of the most beloved and well-respected people in baseball. Appreciations abound. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, which happens to be the year I was born and is also about the mid-way point of Vin's broadcasting career, now in its seventh decade. Tributes to Vin have extended into the world of television; he is the namesake of Dana Scully from the X Files, and The Simpsons lovingly lampoon him in its Springfield Isotopes storylines.

Vin's playful extemporary use of the English language and effortless literary references have had a deeper effect on me as a writer than most of the novelists I've read. A streaking hitter is like "the little girl with the curl" from Longfellow:

"When she was good, / She was very good indeed, / But when she was bad she was horrid."

Responding to a batsman who reaches base safely on a feeble infield hit—what Vin calls a "squibbler"—he's wont to Bowdlerize the Bard (from As You Like It): "'tis a humble thing, but thine own." He's even charming when quipping about a beach ball interrupting play —as in The Simpsons: "…now there's a beach ball on the field, and the balls boys are discussing which one of them's going to go get it." And when it's 2-2 with two out, "the deuces are wiiiiilllllld."

Vin has such a way with words.

Which is why I imagine it'd be intimidating to write ad copy for him—the kind he has read dutifully season after season for Farmer John for the past half century, when the sausage purveyor has been an official sponsor of the LA Dodgers. The ad-speak sounds a little off coming out of Vin, but then he's got that meat flute and it doesn't really matter. As long as Vin Scully is selling it, I'm buying it.

In my youth, I convinced my parents to get us Farmer John bacon from the grocery story for no good reason except that it was Vin that told me about it. Of course I needed that particular bacon! And whenever at the game, I'd always get a Dodger Dog® in lieu of Carl's Jr., opting to embellish it with raw diced onions, relish, and mustard—sometimes even forgoing my beloved catsup, which I learned always attracted the biggest line.

Of course, we all end up taking in the majority of our games away from the ballpark, through radio and TV broadcasts, and then the closest we get to Dodger Dogs® is Vin's ads.

This season, Time Warner Cable has an exclusive deal to carry Dodgers games, and with them, Vin's TV broadcasts. TWC is not available in many homes and bars in LA, and Dodgers fans are rueful. My solution? I went to RadioShack and purchased a $15 portable transistor radio, the same many Vin fans bring with them to the ballpark. I tote it around with me wherever I go, fetching quizzical looks like I'm a cat lady at the grocery store.

Even on the radio, you only hear Vin through the third inning. After that, the only time you hear him is when he's plugging the station, in his pitch-man "Farmer John" voice, which got me thinking about the sausages in the first place.

So I found myself idly heading southbound on the I-5 to Vernon the other day, to visit the source of the Dodger Dogs® Vin had sold me on all these years by the sheer power of his voice.

What I found was a barbed wire-lined industrial swath of several acres at least, and a large steel-walled warehouse painted with a bucolic mural called "Hog's Heaven." The mural's pigs (some smiling, some grotesquely huge, others melancholic-looking) and the human farm people (some deranged, others apparent racist stereotypes, others over-sexed) appeared as if out of a Gothic sacramental rendering, perhaps painted by multiple masters with multiple styles over the generations it took to build this church of Farmer John meat. The air around it carried a whiff a touch more acrid than a Dodger Stadium restroom.

Later, I read that the original artist contracted to do the "Hog Heaven" mural fell to his death from a scaffolding while painting puffy white cumulus clouds and a bright, Dodger-blue sky. So I suppose he never got to hear Vin Scully read a Farmer John ad on radio or TV, or the song of Vin's mirthful, magical meat flute.

I just hope that he did get the chance to hear Vin call a game of baseball.