Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media:

Vin Scully 1: Steve Dilbeck of the Los Angeles Times has Scully clarifying his statements on plans beyond 2014.

Slow breaths now, find you inner calm, think gentle breezes through the pines.

Vin Scully has not announced next season will be his last.

Which doesn’t mean it might not be, but that’s the same as it’s been for several years now.  Scully, 85, said he will do his annual evaluation next summer and determine if he wants to come back for another year.

“I look at each year as possibly my last,” Scully said. “Next year will be no different. It all boils down to come July or August, how I feel physically. I’ll look at how many mistakes I’ve made and if they’re coming for me yet, and how I feel.”

The legendary broadcaster has already agreed to return for a record 65th season next spring, but in a recent interview with KPCC he sounded like next year could be his last.

“I wasn’t making a declaration,” Scully said. “I guess it was misconstrued. Each year is my last, until the next one. I never say yes or no.”

Vin Scully 2: Tom Hoffarth in the Los Angeles Daily has a Q/A with the legend.

Q: You’ve talked about the many reasons for wanting to come back for your 65^th season next year, feeding off that energy and enthusiasm that you’ve seen on the field. You pick up on all that?
A: Yeah, I really do. I’ve really enjoyed the games at home, with the crowds so enthusiastic and high strung. So marvelously excited. I’ve always loved the roar of the crowd, I’ve said that my entire life. And this year, the crowds at Dodger Stadium have been making the kind of noise they made there when the team won the World Series in 1988. And then you look in the dugout, and these guys are just having fun. It’s really a wonderful experience. I don’t anything but sit there and absorb it.

Vin Scully, 3: Can’t get enough Vin, right? Chuck Culpepper in Sports on Earth writes it’s still all about preparation for Scully.

He will turn 86 in November. He will start his 65th season as the voice of the Dodgers next April. He lives with the abiding love of a sprawling metropolis. He has gone from Gil Hodges and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella all the way to Yasiel Puig, whom he can cite as “a study all by himself,” comparable to none, with “his unbridled joy of playing, his enthusiasm, his recklessness.” Yet as another season depletes toward Game 162 and, in this Dodger year, beyond, Vin Scully still totes around a healthy fear of unpreparedness.

“Well, you can see what I’m doing and you can see all these notes, and this is a highlight pencil,” he says. “And it’s one of the things you have to do, because you’re overwhelmed with minutiae, and so I go through all this and I highlight a few things that I want to use on the air. So that at a glance, I will see, ‘Oh, I thought I would use this, so I highlighted this.’ But the problem with this is you start looking and you’re liable to miss a play on the field, and that of course is a killer, so in a sense you’re being lured onto the rocks by the Lorelei, you know, so you try not to do that.”

GameDay: Joe Lucia of Awful Announcing says GameDay needs to go to more new locations, such as it is doing by going to Northwestern Saturday for the first time since 1995.

GameDay going to larger sites is really more of a statement about the current landscape of college football. Over the last season and a half, GameDay has gone to SEC schools seven times. Three of those games have involved Florida, and two each have involved Texas A&M, LSU, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia. Overkill much? Well, those are all perennial powers that are ranked in the top ten, so it makes sense for GameDay to go to those sites.

But last year, things just got to be too much. Florida was featured (albeit on the road both times) in back to back weeks, and three times over a seven week period. South Carolina appeared twice in three weeks. Notre Dame appeared twice in three weeks, and three times over a seven week span. USC and Oregon have hosted a combined eight GameDays since 2008, while the rest of the Pac-12 has hosted a total of four – and one of those game when Utah was in the Mountain West. In case you’re curious, Oregon was the road team in all three of those Pac-12 conference games.

Blown coverage: Amanda Rykoff of Awful Announcing says TBS dropped the ball by failing to show the dramatic pregame festivities at Pittsburgh Tuesday night.

TBS, one of MLB’s three broadcast partners for the postseason, did not show the traditional pre-game player introductions, National Anthem or ceremonial first pitch before Pittsburgh’s 6-2 win over the Cincinnati Reds. Let that wash over you again: there was no television coverage of what should have been — and was — some of the most compelling drama of the evening.

This was the best story in baseball and I, along with most interested observers, could not wait to see how the Pirates and their fans celebrated the return of postseason baseball. As 8 o’clock on the east coast approached, I kept waiting for TBS to leave the pre-game studio show with Keith Olbermann, Mark DeRosa, Pedro Martinez and Dirk Hayhurst to bring us the on-field player introductions, National Anthem and ceremonial first pitch. It never happened.

Amy Trask: Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily News says Trask is shining in her new role as studio analyst for CBS Sports Network’s NFL pregame show.

In the TV business, she may call herself “an undrafted rookie free agent.” But having her on the CBS roster should already make other networks wonder why their scouting departments didn’t pluck her up first.

“It’s very liberating after all these years with a team to now speak on things where I’m accountable to me,” Trask said from her San Francisco home office Wednesday. “I’m also coming to the realization that sometimes I’m not necessarily best at following direction. But it’s also nice to work as a group of very collaborative individuals.”

Pedro: Richard Deitsch at SI.com talks to Pedro Martinez about working as a studio analyst for TBS during the playoffs.

Martinez said he auditioned on Aug. 17 at Turner’s studios in Atlanta on a panel with Olbermann, Gary Sheffield and Bobby Valentine, with Turner production executives putting the three potential studio analysts through different game situations over a 120-minute tryout. Turner Sports executives liked what they heard from Martinez and let his agent know he had landed the job. What does he want baseball viewers to come away with after watching him?

“First the right facts, and then hopefully a lesson on some of the things that players go through during a season,” said Martinez, 41. “Hopefully, this will be teaching moment for the fans and kids who are watching. I want to educate you on the different aspects of the game.”

“He has the great knowledge how to pitch, but unlike me, he pitched at the highest, highest level anyone has ever pitched,” said Turner Sports MLB analyst Ron Darling. “He also has such a great personality. He has such a love for the game. He’s an interesting person and I think he will bring all of that to the booth.”

Premier League: Richard Sandomir of the New York Times reports that the Premier League is paying off for NBC.

So far, the formula is working. NBCSN’s 22 telecasts have been seen by an average of 391,000 viewers, 70 percent better than the average game last season on Fox Soccer, which carried most of the games, and ESPN and ESPN2, which broadcast about one game a week in a licensing deal. NBCSN, however, has about twice as many subscribers as Fox Soccer. More important, at least to NBC, is that NBCSN’s daily viewership from Aug. 17 to Sept. 22 swelled 67 percent, to 77,000 viewers.

That is still a fraction of ESPN’s 1.2 million in that period and fewer than the month-old Fox Sports 1’s 121,000. But the highs are getting higher. Last Sunday afternoon, 852,000 viewers watched Manchester City trounce Manchester United, 4-1, in one of the Premier League’s marquee early-season matches. That was the biggest audience so far on NBCSN.

John Guppy, a veteran soccer executive who founded Gilt Edge Soccer Marketing, said, “What they’ve done — and it’s not that Fox didn’t do it, but maybe it comes across more directly to consumers — is they’ve made the Premier League feel special and important.”

ESPN 3D: Fang’s Bites notes that ESPN 3D, which started with much fanfare, went dark on Monday.

The viewership for 3-D was so small, only an estimated 115,000 people were watching 3-D programming at one time, that it didn’t register with Nielsen for significant ratings data. By the time of this year’s Consumer Electronic Show, it was apparent that 3-D TV was on its deathbed. Television manufacturers were now pointing to the “next big thing” in the industry, 4K high definition which is even sharper than the current high definition displays.

However, as 3-D TV cost an average $1,500 extra for consumers, in hard economic times, it was difficult to convince buyers to shell out the extra cash to go to the third dimension.