It's a long season with a lot of downtime to fill, and the Dodgers broadcast team of Joe Davis and Jessica Mendoza seemed just a little bit loopy in the later stages of L.A.'s loss to the Cubs on Monday night. I might be, too, if I was at the very end of a brutal heat wave that had SoCal in the toaster for a week. That, I think, is how one gets in the mood to sneak in some Queen karaoke on a TV microphone.
First, I just love watching any game with an audible organist. As someone who can, for example, hear the opening few seconds of "Dancing In The Street" and immediately realize it's not the mix I grew up with, I love trying to identify their melodies in between pitches. It's refreshing to jump from ballpark to ballpark and not always hear the same three clips that have stayed in rotation for seemingly my whole life.
But for Mendoza and Davis, the little bit of "Bohemian Rhapsody" goofiness led to a chat about the on-deck hitter's walk-up music. Max Muncy's pick is "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" by Shaboozey, a very pleasant genre-blurring summer megahit that pretty subtly lifts its chorus from the much rowdier J-Kwon single "Tipsy" from 20 years ago. Neither Davis nor I actually knew about the connection (J-Kwon is before my time), but Mendoza did. She blanked on J-Kwon's name for a bit but seized on it in time for Muncy's at-bat. Fortunately for everyone, the song got extended play for a Cubs mound visit, so Davis got to listen intently and surface a musical memory. Once upon a time in the Midwest, Joe Davis—who, in my imagination, has always possessed Joe Davis's current voice—was blasting J-Kwon in a big American vehicle that looked something like this.
A little earlier in the game, Davis brought up a story that never gets old: How Vin Scully's call of Sandy Koufax's perfect game (mostly) survived in its entirety because a teenager in love taped the radio broadcast while he said goodbye to his college-bound future wife, and his dad noticed the recorder wasn't turned on in the second inning. (The famed ninth-inning call, at least, was always available because by that point Scully knew it should be saved.) The whole reason for revisiting it was to praise Scully, but it actually reminded me of how well Davis has performed as his successor, which I've noticed especially of late because I like to watch Shohei Ohtani before I go to bed. He's a good storyteller with a nice eye for detail who, thanks to his national experience, brings a lot of knowledge about the Dodgers' opponents to the booth. He also, crucially, hasn't ever tried to call games in that sage, intense Scully monologue that set him apart. There's no Scully impression beyond "being good at calling baseball." But I do kind of long to hear Scully's thoughts on J-Kwon.
