Vin Scully, the gentlemanly, yarn-spinning
play-by-play man whose
mellifluous voice provided the soundtrack to Dodger baseball from
Brooklyn to Los Angeles for a jaw-dropping 67 seasons, has died. He was
94.
Scully, a member of the Dodgers organization from 1950 until his
retirement following the 2016 regular season, died Tuesday at his home
in Hidden Hills, the Dodgers announced.
When he bid farewell to the broadcast booth, he had called nearly half of the games for a franchise that was born in 1890.
Always even-tempered and an easy listen, Scully was credited with
turning Los Angeles into a “transistor town” — his broadcasts were
pumped throughout the L.A. Coliseum (the team’s first home out west) and
then Dodger Stadium and wafted from traffic jams and street-side venues
throughout the sprawling city.
“When a game is on the air, the physical presence of his voice is overwhelming,”
wrote Robert Creamer for a 1964
Sports Illustrated profile of Scully titled, “The Transistor Kid.”
“His pleasantly nasal baritone comes out of radios on the back counters
of orange juice stands, from transistors held by people sitting under
trees, in barber shops and bars, and from cars everywhere — parked cars,
cars waiting for red lights to turn green, cars passing you at 65 on
the freeways, cars edging along next to you in rush-hour traffic jams.”
It was such a shame that because many distributors refused to carry
Time Warner Cable’s Dodgers channel in a cost dispute, most TV viewers
in L.A. were unable to hear the great Scully at work for several years.
Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, Scully also called MLB
games for NBC starting in 1983. (He received a Peabody Award that
year.) On the network’s
Game of the Week, he was partnered with
Joe Garagiola.
Through all that, Scully continued to serve as the voice of the Dodgers.
“His timing is impeccable,” Dodgers broadcaster Rick Monday told Sports Illustrated
in May 2016. “He’s never in a rush. It’s like the game waits for him.
We have a little joke among us. When Vin starts one of his stories, the
batter is going to hit three foul balls in a row, and he’ll have plenty
of time to get it in. When the rest of us starts one, the next is a
ground-ball double play to end the inning.”
In 2010, the American Sportscasters Association named him the greatest sportscaster of the 20th century.
Scully was smooth and cool and made it sound easy. He didn’t talk too
much or hyperventilate for the home team. When the Dodgers won the 1959
National League pennant, his line was vintage: “We go to Chicago.” That
was one of the few times he ever referred to the Dodgers as “we.”
Scully’s honey-soaked voice was an instrument, his pace varied, from
rat-a-tat to complete silence, allowing the crowd and background noise
to fill things in. He left the microphone for two minutes during the
roar that followed Hank Aaron’s record-setting 715th home run in 1974.
For
Kirk Gibson’s dramatic ninth-inning blow
in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series that would propel the Dodgers to the
title, Scully said: “She is gone! In a year that has been so
improbable, the impossible has happened.”
“Mine, I guess, is no style at all. I’m just myself, coming to chat with the audience,” he once said.
“A little roller up along first … behind the bag … it gets through Buckner! Here comes [Ray] Knight, and the Mets win it!”
Another one of Scully’s more memorable calls came when he
“time-stamped” Sandy Koufax’s fourth career no-hitter, this one a
perfect game. “The time on the scoreboard is 9:44,” he told his radio
listeners. “The date, September the 9th, 1965.”
He described the scene at Dodger Stadium: “There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.”
“More than a half-century later, it still raises goosebumps,”
Bob Costas
recalled in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech in July 2018. “The
building of the drama and anticipation, the meticulous attention to
detail, the keen eye of a reporter blended with the graceful rose of a
poet. A perfect performance on the mound matched, and enhanced, by a
perfect performance in the booth.”
Scully’s skill was particularly evident in the tedious games that
invariably came up. His forte was his storytelling. He mixed in vivid
and thoughtful digressions that kept fans glued to his words, as likely
to embark on an architectural review of a ballpark, literary or
historical references or other engaging info. He brought out the color
and life of the game beyond the lines.
Away from the field, Scully was heard on TV shows like
Mister Ed,
Highway to Heaven,
Brooklyn Bridge and
The X-Files (
Gillian Anderson’s character is named for him) and in the 1962 Glenn Ford film
Experiment in Terror. He even hosted a game show (
It Takes Two) and his own afternoon TV talk show.
His wife of 47 years,
Sandi,
died in January 2021. Survivors include his children, Kevin, Todd,
Erin, Kelly and Catherine; 21 grandchildren; and six
great-grandchildren.
“We have lost an icon,” Dodgers president & CEO Stan Kasten said in
a statement. “The Dodgers’ Vin Scully was one of the greatest voices in
all of sports. He was a giant of a man, not only as a broadcaster, but
as a humanitarian. He loved people. He loved life. He loved baseball and
the Dodgers. And he loved his family. His voice will always be heard
and etched in all of our minds forever. I know he was looking forward to
joining the love of his life, Sandi. Our thoughts and prayers go out to
his family during this very difficult time. Vin will be truly missed.”
Vincent Edward Scully was born in The Bronx on Nov. 29, 1927. His
father, a traveling salesman, died when he was 4, and he grew up in an
apartment in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. His love for
sportscasting was fueled when he crawled underneath the family’s wooden
radio console to absorb the roar of the crowd during game broadcasts.
At Fordham University, he worked on the school’s paper, ran the radio station, wrote as a stringer for The New York Times and was a poor-hitting outfielder on the baseball team. He also sang in a quartet called The Shaving Mugs.
Scully served two years in the U.S. Navy before graduating from Fordham
in 1949. He began his professional broadcasting career as a staff
announcer at radio station WTOP in Washington, where a CBS executive
noticed him and took him to see Red Barber, the network’s No. 1
sportscaster.
When CBS needed someone in an emergency to work the Boston
University-Maryland football game at Fenway Park, Barber called Scully.
Later, Barber suggested to Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn
Dodgers, that Scully would make a good addition to the booth at Ebbets
Field, and Scully was hired in 1950 at $5,000 a year.
Naive and good-natured, Scully failed to file travel expense reports,
and the earnest announcer nearly went broke the first year.
He had replaced Ernie Harwell (who had left to join the New York
Giants) on the Dodgers broadcasts, the No. 3 man behind Barber and
Connie Desmond. Then Desmond departed and Scully moved up a notch. By
the beginning of the 1954 season, Barber had jumped to the New York
Yankees and the Dodgers had themselves a new golden throat, 26-year-old
Scully.
With the Yankees in town on July 31, 2013, Scully reminisced on the air
about the memorable home runs he had witnessed: Bobby Thomson’s
shocking sudden-death game-winner that sent the Giants past Brooklyn and
into the 1951 World Series; Aaron’s shot that moved him past Babe Ruth;
and Gibson’s unthinkable blast.
Scully had another, less-known one — from Game 4 of the 1963 World
Series, with the Dodgers one win away from sweeping their bitter rivals —
that revealed the humility that marked the man and his career.
Scully talked about how the Yankees’ Mel Allen, another legendary
play-by-play man, had been suffering from severe laryngitis. Doctors
told him to stay subdued, and Allen remained in control through three
games of the Series, broadcast by NBC (Scully also was working for the
network).
But when Mickey Mantle of the Yankees homered off Koufax to tie the
score 1-1 in the seventh, “Everything went for broke,” said Scully, who
had worked the first half of the game before stepping aside. “Forget
about the caution with his voice. Allen gave a great call, but it was
too long and too hard for his throat, and he just came apart.
“Mel tried to speak, but nothing would really come out. I was supposed
to go down to the clubhouse if the Yankees lost to do the Dodgers
celebration. However, [NBC Sports head Tom] Gallery tapped Mel on the
shoulder as if to say, ‘Give the microphone to Vin.’ And I felt
horrible; my heart was broken for Mel.”
Scully called the end of the game, won by the Dodgers. Allen was fired the next season and never called another World Series.
“Here was Mel on the world stage, this great moment … that was a
valuable lesson for me,” Scully said. “There but for the grace of God go
I. It could happen to me anytime, anywhere.”
Nothing like that ever happened to Scully, and he bowed out on his own
terms at San Francisco’s AT&T Park on Oct. 2, 2016. As Giants
reliever Sergio Romo was retiring the Dodgers’ Rob Segedin for the final
out, he said:
“It’s a good line, and it’s one certainly I’ve been holding on to for I
think most of the year … The line is, don’t be sad that it’s over,
smile because it happened. And that’s really the way I feel for the
remarkable opportunity I was given and was allowed to keep for all these
years.
“I have said enough for a lifetime. And for the last time, I wish you all a very pleasant good afternoon.”
