Vin Scully calls Dodgers vs. Giants Game 5 ‘most important game’ in rivalry

Legendary Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully deemed tonight’s Game 5 match between the Dodgers and the Giants “the most important game” in rivalry history.

Iconic Dodgers commentator Vin Scully just said that the Dodgers-Giants Game 5 NLDS tiebreaker is “the most important game in the history of their rivalry.”

For someone who’s been the voice of the Dodgers for 67 years, that’s saying something.

Anticipating debates on his take, Scully argued that the 1951 Dodgers win that claimed the NL pennant was the team’s greatest moment, but not necessarily its biggest game.

Scully finished his thoughts by sharing his “one prayer” for tonight’s game: “However it’s decided, I hope there’s no goat, no single player to shoulder the blame for a loss like Bill Buckner in the 1986 series between the Red Sox and Mets.”

Legendary Dodgers announcer Vin Scully declares Dodgers-Giants Game 5 to be “the most important game” in rivalry history

Besides being a living historian witness to many of baseball’s greatest moments, the 93-year-old Scully has actually been a fan of both the Dodgers and the Giants.

Born in 1927, Scully discovered his love of baseball at age 8 while watching the 1936 World Series. As the New York Yankees battled the New York Giants for the championship, Scully sided with the badly beaten Giants.

“As a little kid, my first thought was, ‘Oh, those poor Giants.’ From that little kernel, I developed a desire and a love for baseball. Since the Giants were 20 city blocks from my school and I could get there thanks to the Catholic Youth Organization and the Police Athletic League, I could go to games free, Monday through Friday. So I became a very big Giants fan.”

But it was the Brooklyn Dodgers that Scully covered from 1950 to 2016 when he retired at the age of 88. In what the Los Angeles Times described as a “poetic ending” to his career, his final broadcast was describing a game between his most beloved teams: the Giants and the Dodgers.

“As things turn out, the last game of the season, and my last broadcast, will be against the Giants, in San Francisco, Oct. 2, 2016 — exactly 80 years to the day that I saw that Giant-Yankee scorecard,” Scully said in 2016.

“That is a fitting conclusion, I think, to my career.”