If only more Californians could retire like Vin.

Vin Scully, that is. The Hall of Fame announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers will call his last game this Sunday, October 2, a month shy of his 89th birthday. That retirement has touched off a national celebration of Scully’s announcing mastery, his storytelling methods, and his many contributions to baseball through 67 years with the Dodgers.

But what deserves even more attention—including from Californians who couldn’t care less about sports—is the smart, progressive way he planned his retirement.

In this country, retirements are often abrupt. People depart the workforce suddenly and at a time decided by numbers—a company rule, a buyout, Social Security calculations, or retirement benefit formulas—not what’s best for retirees or the workplaces they’re leaving. Formula-driven retirement is standard in California’s public sector, where pension rules sometimes push people to retire earlier.

Scully’s retirement, by contrast, was anything but abrupt. He phased in his departure over two decades. Back in the mid 1990s, as he approached the age of 70, Scully—who in his prime announced not just Dodger games but also national football, baseball, and golf—pared back his duties. He focused solely on baseball, then dropped national broadcasting. Then, a decade ago, he gradually reduced his Dodger obligations, mostly by progressively limiting his travel (first he stopped going to the East Coast, then he stayed west of the Rockies, then he limited himself to games in California). In his final year, he worked home games almost exclusively.

Describing this long, slow phase-out, Scully once said, “I would like to disappear like the Cheshire Cat, where [at the end] the only thing left is a smile.”

The Cheshire Cat Strategy has been a success. Scully has remained robust, his sharp, wide-ranging observations carrying nine innings of a game—solo—with characteristic ease. (Other, younger baseball announcers typically have on-air partners and work only some of the innings).

This super-longevity has huge value to the Dodgers and their fans. The myriad tributes to him these days, as he retires, emphasize how his knowledge and long memory have made him a back-office resource to the nation’s second most-valuable baseball team. And fans treasure how he’s connected them and their families across more than three generations; Angelenos have been writing letters and Facebook posts about how their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents all shared the experience of listening to Scully.

Could Scully’s phased retirement be a model for other Californians? The question might seem daft. After all, this state famously thinks little about its older citizens (Scully is a special case), preferring to celebrate younger technologists and stars who “innovate” or “disrupt” or “invent” the new. And retirement has become one of California’s nastiest legal and political minefields, especially when the conversation turns to pensions and retiree health care for government workers. Some of us see robust pensions and retiree health care as underfunded, expensive indulgences and a form of inter-generational theft, with the old robbing the young. Others see any attempt to reform pensions as a scheme to impoverish workers. The two sides have been fighting bitterly via ballot initiatives and litigation for decades.

These retirement wars leave little room for a conversation about how we might make the so-called golden years better for all of us—for retirees, for businesses, for governments. But that’s precisely the conversation California needs to have.

Our state is rapidly aging; the number of people 65 and older is projected to nearly double by 2030. At the same time, immigration is flat, and our birth rate has fallen below the level needed to replace the population. So California urgently needs to find ways to coax more productivity out of its most senior citizens.

Instead, we watch as valuable baby boomer workers retire, leaving huge voids of knowledge and skill that can’t easily be filled. Government agencies in particular are finding it hard to hire and retain replacements for retirees who had specialized knowledge and high-level financial and technical skills. New hires too often leave after they’re trained, because they can make more money in the private sector.

Part of the answer to this problem lies in Scully’s example: we must make it possible for valuable workers to stick around into late old age. The popularity of Gov. Jerry Brown, who will be 80 when he leaves office in 2018, suggests there is some public appreciation for having senior citizens work long past retirement age. (Brown himself likes to joke about the fiscal benefits of long-serving full-time workers; our pension system would be fully funded, the governor jokes, “if everybody in state service worked as long as I have.”)

But Brown, who is childless, has a life built around public service; it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him run for another public office, like controller, once he’s moved out of the governor’s mansion. For people with a broader array of family obligations, a phased retirement like Scully’s makes more sense. The central principle is flexibility: the ability to mix varying levels of work with life in a way that makes both better.

But our retirement and work systems aren’t agile enough. To the contrary, they’re highly complicated, so full of rules that designing a flexible schedule, while legally possible, can be more trouble than it’s worth. I know a number of state retirees who still work, but under very informal arrangements involving few hours of paid work, or even volunteering for agencies or officials they admire. Designing flexible and busier arrangements can bump up against the strict limit on the number of hours someone can work after entering the state’s CalPERS retirement system: 960 hours a year, or less than 20 hours a week. And those limited part-time options are often discouraged because, in the context of the pension wars, government officials fear accusations of permitting “double dipping.”

Legal scholars advise me that legislation would be needed to establish a new category for workers who want flexible, phased retirements in the public sector. So I hereby propose that California governments create the Vin Scully Phased Retirement Plan. When employees reach retirement age, they should be able to enter into a phased plan, subject to the approval of their supervisors, that could be altered by mutual agreement. The details could get complicated, but one goal of the Scully Plan would be to ensure that phased retirement neither hurt, nor spiked, the employee’s retirement benefits.

Phased retirements are hardly new. Smart businesses offer them, as do academia and the courts—just ask emeritus professors and senior-status judges. Why should a state that has paid employees for so long completely lose the benefit of their experience and knowledge?

The best argument for phased retirement is that it’s good for the retiree. Such connections to work and colleagues can keep older people’s minds sharp—and even help them live longer. Indeed, some research suggests that older people who work moderately—25 hours a week—are especially productive and creative.

“Hang in there,” is cliché, in sports and life. But it would represent real progress as a principle for reorganizing how we work late in life. “All I know,” Vin Scully recently said, “is I’m eternally grateful for having been allowed to work so many games.”

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Brendan and I got married at home plate nine years ago this summer, with family and friends standing on the dirt track between the dugouts (the Dodgers were finicky about letting people walk on their manicured grass). A close friend dressed up as an umpire and performed the ceremony as we stood in the batter’s boxes. Then we all went up to the Stadium Club for the reception, with dinner and dancing and Dodger dogs. It was my perfect day.

Like a lot of my fellow Angelenos, I’m a big fan of the Dodgers. I love to watch their games on TV. I love Vin Scully. And as a physical education teacher in the South Bay, I know how much sports and the rituals around them can mean to our lives, our health, and our communities.

But when I watch a game that’s taking place at Dodger Stadium, I see it in a special way. On a baseball telecast, you are constantly looking at home plate—which is also where our family began. Brendan and I now have two kids, 8 and 5, who like to watch the games with us. There is never a game when I don’t have a moment of remembering that day.

This season, my ritual of watching the Dodgers, and remembering our day, has been taken away. Dodger games are no longer available on my television—or on the TVs of 70 percent of people in Southern California, including Vin Scully himself. The Dodgers sold the rights to their games to Time Warner Cable for big money, but Time Warner has only 30 percent of the L.A. market. Given how much it paid for the rights, Time Warner wants to pass on its costs by licensing the games to our region’s cable providers, including mine, at a high cost. But those cable providers are balking, and negotiations are at a standstill.

Without the Dodgers on TV, I feel empty. And I’m angry, though I don’t want to join the ranks of hateful fans who are using social media to go after Time Warner. Instead, I wrote letters to Time Warner, to the Dodgers, and then to the L.A. Times. I haven’t gotten a response—and I still can’t get the Dodgers on TV.

For now, I’ve turned to radio. We have a little Radio Shack AM/FM radio that we used to take to the beach or the track. Now, I take it everywhere. But you only get Vin for the first three innings on the radio; on TV, he does all nine innings of the 100 or so games a year he broadcasts. Still, I listen as much as I can. I even take the radio to bed and fall asleep to the call of the game. Seriously.

Some people are coping by going to restaurants and bars, but so many establishments have DirectTV (which has the biggest sports packages) that it’s hard to find a place with Time Warner, and thus the Dodgers. I did make one trip to Vegas, which was fabulous: I could sit in the sports book all day and watch the Arizona Diamondbacks feed as they faced the Dodgers. And we have tickets to seven home games this season, since we split two season tickets with 11 other people. But that’s only a small fraction of the Dodgers’ schedule.

If this goes on much longer, I worry that my kids, and others, will lose a cherished daily ritual, and their connection of Dodger baseball. The game has a lot to offer. As an educator, I love to see children learn it because it’s complex, because it has rich history, and because it’s slow and teaches patience to kids who are used to the fast pace of technology.

My own kids now ask me, “Where are the Dodgers, Mommy?” I have no answer. They haven’t gone anywhere. But they’re invisible. And my kids don’t sit still for the radio.

So right now—or at least before my anniversary, June 25—let’s find a way to bring back the boys in blue. Bring back the great ritual of televised Dodger games. And bring me back home plate.

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To: The People of Los Angeles
From: The Future
Re: Urgent Need to Deal with Vin Scully Succession

I, The Future, do not typically communicate via memo. But as a Los Angeles native (yes, The Future was born here), I must intervene in the past when my hometown faces a mortal threat.

The mortality of Vin Scully, the Hall of Fame announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, is such a threat. Scully binds together Los Angeles like no other living person. He is, as the Los Angeles Times declared in 2008, “this city’s last civic treasure.”

But I must warn you that Mr. Scully will not occupy the microphone forever. He is 84. He just announced that he won’t go on road trips east of Phoenix. He has said he may retire. And life is short, as Scully is fond of noting. (Remember when Vin, after reporting that an injured player was “listed as day to day,” paused for a beat and added, “Aren’t we all?”)

Alas, you, the people of L.A. of 2012, are behaving as though Scully will be the soundtrack of Southern California summers forever. You have failed to come up with a plan to replace him. If you don’t, you will regret it.

Now is the time. The Dodgers are for sale, and the most important thing about the new owners (despite all the misdirected questions from Angelenos about ticket prices, Magic Johnson, free agents, and the McCourts) is what they will do when Vin must be replaced.

Here’s the bad news: based on the current space-time trajectory, things do not go well. The new owners look around the country and hire someone who, while competent, disappoints Dodger fans. The person has no special connection to the people of Los Angeles, and the city loses the last voice that ties its denizens together.

Now for the good news: this does not have to be. If you come together soon, you can demand that prospective Dodgers owners commit to a Scully replacement process.

What would such a process look like? Here in the Future, I recently convened a Zócalo panel discussion at the Floating Theater (it sits, suspended in the air, 5,000 feet above Koreatown–your grandchildren will love everything about it except the glass-bottomed bathrooms). We came up with five options for succession planning:

1. The Warren Buffett Option
In your time, the man who sees the future most clearly (despite the odd stumble) is a billionaire Oracle from Omaha. He chose his successor at Berkshire Hathaway all by himself while making a point of not identifying the replacement until the moment of transition. Scully could be asked to do the same. A successor picked this way would have public legitimacy and an eternal connection to the beloved Vin.

2. The College of Cardinals Plan
When Catholics pick a pope, they put the leaders of the church in the Sistine Chapel. Why not apply this approach to picking a successor for Scully, who is, after all, a devout Catholic? Assemble all of America’s–heck, make it the world’s–leading broadcasters in the Stadium Club. Lock them inside, with nothing but Farmer John Dodger Dogs for sustenance, until they figure out who would make the best Vin replacement. They could even signal that they’ve made a decision by burning Frank McCourt’s deed to the team and letting the smoke waft up over Chavez Ravine. A successor chosen this way would be a true professional with an established reputation for excellence.

3. Digital Vin
Don’t replace Vin at all. Eternal life is not yet possible, but technology offers an alternative. Contract with one of California’s artificial intelligence companies to create a Vin machine that could announce games. It would be programmed to speak exactly as Vin did in 1988, the year of the Dodgers’ last World Series championship.

4. The American Idol Plan
Hold an open international competition with auditions in Southern California and New York City (Vin’s hometown). Contestants would announce a batter or two, with panels of judges (I’m thinking Fernando Valenzuela, Larry King, and Snoop Dogg) rendering verdicts.

The top nine candidates would be brought to Dodger Stadium to announce one inning each. Fans could vote over the Internet for their favorites. The final three would each broadcast a road game east of Phoenix, and the winner would be chosen with another online vote.

5. The Tommy Lasorda Plan
Give the job to Tommy Lasorda. He’s not a broadcaster. But people love him. And when you think about the way Tommy eats, the fact that he’s not yet dead suggests that he’ll live forever.

Joe Mathews, who owns 1/12 of a Dodgers season ticket, is Zócalo’s California editor.

*Photo courtesy of Malingering.

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