I was looking at the Dodgers media release tonight, pertaining to the upcoming Vin Scully weekend at Dodger Stadium.

And for a moment I was thinking, “What is there left to say or do? Are we pushing this too far? Are the Dodgers taking it too far? Are we going to ruin the health of this 88-year-old man by making him acknowledge every one of his 10 million fans over the next week?”

And then I read the excellent ESPN.com piece on Vin and his career and his final days in the broadcast booth … and I’ve swung the other way.

At least to this point:

I will convey a few anecdotes involving Vin and me. It will not involve any bother at all for Vin. These things already happened.

Here is No. 1.

To be clear: It’s not like Vin and I are best friends. We were in the same press box a couple of hundred times and I might walk past him in the cafeteria, but while he may be the most gregarious man in baseball, I never was, and what could have been dozens of brief, “Hey, how about that homer?” conversations … that never happened between Vin and me.

Also, he intimidated me. This is Vin Scully, the voice of God and the best man in Los Angeles. I can’t just start yakking with him. I have to think this through.

So.

He told a story the other day, during a conference call set up by the Baseball Writers Association of America, which I got in on from France, and he talked about when he was a kid, and how he loved to listen to sports events on radio, and he would stretch out under the big ol’ radio in the family home and soak up the ambient noise. He loved the roar of the crowd, whatever the event was.

I probably should have heard that story by now, but I had not, and it reminded me that I did something similar when I was a kid.

My father had a huge stereo system in the formal living room, rarely used, but when I was maybe 8 or 9 I would lie on the carpet in front of an enormous speaker and listen to Vin talking about the Dodgers. I didn’t do it to appreciate the roar of the crowd, I did it because I was a Dodgers fan and I liked the announcer. (And now I’m thinking about Dodger Dogs.)

So, I nearly always felt intimidated in the presence of Vin, him having been a distant and special personage going back to my boyhood, and I sometimes made a point of not walking past/behind the broadcast booth — because I wouldn’t be ready with a suitable salutation/reply if he happened to see me.

I can’t think of more than a handful of people I have met in my life who have that effect on me. At the moment, I can’t think of any. OK, wait. John Wooden.

But still … still … I set up formal interviews with Vin probably three times, over the 20 or so years that I saw more than a few Dodgers games in a season.

One of those interviews …

Remember, Vin is the most polite man still living on Planet Earth. He has that rare gift (or perhaps “that rare patience” is more like it) for making the other person feel secure — if not important. And he does that through conversation.

So, Vin answered every question in paragraphs, not sentences, as he always does, and things were going just fine, and I wasn’t even nervous anymore.

But as often happens when anyone from the Los Angeles media market speaks with Vin, that person almost inevitably begins to tell Vin what Vin meant to him or her. Because everyone loves Vin and feels compelled to tell him about it.

(Do we all do that with anyone else? We all do it, or would, if we had the chance.)

His skill at deflecting those sorts of declarations, of making them seem less revealing, is supreme.

He makes it OK for you to have told him how important he was in your life, in your youth, or from some family event.

So, end of the interview, and I tell him about my Grandmother Laura.

She was born in 1890, in St. Louis, and was a big Cardinals fans. She talked about “Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang” when I had no idea what she was talking about, beyond “she’s talking about the Cardinals.”

She moved to Southern California in 1940, and two decades later I was very close to her. (One of her gifts was making just about all of her 11 grandchildren feel as if they were her favorite grandchild.)

I spent a lot of Friday nights at her house, when she was in her 70s. It was to keep her company, because she lived alone in a two-bedroom house, but it was me who felt lucky to be with her. I always could eat as much ice cream as I liked and she would let me watch wrestling and roller derby on TV, and we would play cards while we talked about family, politics, and how cats are bad because they eat birds.

It seemed like we were staying up late, but we never would, not really, and maybe about 9 p.m. she would go to bed in the smaller bedroom, facing the street, and I would be in the big bed in the master bedroom.

While she was working on sleeping, she would turn on a radio and tune in the Dodgers game, and I could hear it, just down the hall in the other bedroom. By now, she was also a fan of the Dodgers.

And at the end of one of my conversations with Vin, I said to him:

“You know, my grandmother would go to sleep listening to you.”

And he smiled and said: “I have that effect on a lot of people.”