For Dodgers fans born from the Lost Generation to Generation Z, an evening would not begin until they heard Vin Scully’s opening greeting.
“It’s tiiiiiime for Dodger baseball,” Scully would say. “Hi everybody …”
Scully, the beloved broadcaster of Dodgers baseball for 67 seasons and the voice of the sport for Southern Californians of all ages, died Tuesday at the age of 94.
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“We have lost an icon,” Dodger president and CEO Stan Kasten said in a statement released by the team. “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.”
Scully broadcast his first Dodgers games in 1950. He called the bulk of Jackie Robinson’s career and the exploits of the other Boys of Summer. He followed the club from Brooklyn to Los Angeles when Walter O’Malley went west in 1958. He served as the soundtrack, first on radio and later on television, for the exploits of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, Walter Alston and Tom Lasorda, Maury Wills and Kirk Gibson, Fernando Valenzuela and Orel Hershiser, Mike Piazza and Gary Sheffield, Adrián Beltré and Adrián González, Kenley Jansen and Clayton Kershaw. He was the constant as ownership of the franchise transferred from the O’Malleys to Fox to Frank McCourt to the current Guggenheim era.
For so many of those seasons, Scully was the solitary voice emanating over the airwaves. He was renowned for his spellbinding monologues, his folksy wisdom and his sense of the moment — some of Scully’s most famous calls revolved around silence, his usage of the crowd to tell a story that words could not justify. When he spoke, though, he forged an enduring bond with the public. “Friends,” he called those listening. From the booth, he told stories and shared confidences. He operated with grace and humor.
The broadcast area at Dodger Stadium already doubles as a shrine to Scully. The space bears his name: the Vin Scully Press Box. A row of six portraits, capturing Scully’s fashion incarnations during his tenure, line the entrance. Another portrait commemorates Scully winning the Ford C. Frick Award in 1982. The Baseball Hall of Fame honored him with the plaque 34 seasons before his retirement. Scully spent the majority of his career as an icon, including 15 seasons calling national games for CBS and NBC.
“Vin is our Babe Ruth,” fellow Dodgers broadcaster Charley Steiner told Sports Illustrated in 2016, Scully’s final season behind the microphone at Chavez Ravine. “The best there ever was.”
“For me, Vin Scully is the best there’s ever been for broadcasting baseball,” Giants broadcaster Jon Miller told ABC-7 in San Francisco in 2016. “And likely the best there ever will be.”
“I’m blown away at the way his mind works and his mastery over the language and his ability to weave,” Fox broadcaster Joe Buck told The Tampa Bay Times in 2016. “Probably in another life, Vin would have made great carpets. He can weave a story into the middle of play-by-play and make it seamless.”
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Vincent Edward Scully grew up far from the West Coast he called home for most of his life. He was born Nov. 29, 1927, in The Bronx. His father sold silk, and his mother was a homemaker. He was raised in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, within the shadow of the Giants’ home at the Polo Grounds. It was here he first fell for baseball.
What drew him in, as he told the story, was pity.
“Many years ago,” Scully explained in a package prepared for his final broadcast, “a little red-headed boy was walking home from school, passing a Chinese laundry, and stopped to see the score of a World Series game posted in the window.”
The Yankees had trounced the Giants, 18-4, in the second game of the 1936 Fall Classic. Feeling sympathy for the underdog, Scully declared himself a Giants diehard.
Only 14 years later, at the age of 23, Scully became the youngest person to call a World Series game. In the intervening years, he had spent time in the Navy and attended Fordham University in The Bronx. Upon graduation, he got a job in Washington, D.C., where he eventually caught the ear of Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber. Scully had found a mentor. They called games together until 1953, when Barber jousted with O’Malley and Gillette over his pay. Barber left to call Yankees games. Scully slid into his place.
And so it was Scully behind the microphone when Johnny Podres stood tall against the Yankees in the 1955 World Series. When O’Malley uprooted for Los Angeles, Scully came along. He helped a new generation of baseball fans learn the game. Robert Creamer, the Sports Illustrated scribe, called Scully by 1964 “as much a part of the Los Angeles scene as the freeways and the smog.”
“When a game is on the air, the physical presence of his voice is overwhelming,” Creamer wrote. “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.”
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A year later, as the Dodgers pushed toward a third championship as Angelenos, Scully kept listeners rapt on KFI as Koufax twirled a perfect game. The proceedings required only an hour and 43 minutes. After Cubs veteran Harvey Kuenn made the final out, Scully let the listeners bask in the crowd’s adulation of Koufax. Only after the cheers subsided did he speak.
“On the scoreboard in right field,” Scully said, “it is 9:46 p.m. in the City of the Angels, Los Angeles, California. And a crowd of 29,139 just sitting in to see the only pitcher in baseball history to hurl four no-hit, no-run games. He has done it four straight years, and now he capped it: On his fourth no-hitter he made it a perfect game.
“And Sandy Koufax, whose name will always remind you of strikeouts, did it with a flourish. He struck out the last six consecutive batters. So when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record books, that ‘K’ stands out even more than the O-U-F-A-X.”
The rest of the country met Scully when he called golf, tennis and the NFL for CBS and NBC in the 1970s and ’80s. His assignment for NBC placed him in Queens and Boston for the 1986 World Series. Scully got the chance to put his stamp on Bill Buckner becoming a household name.
“Little roller up along first,” Scully said, as the baseball followed its fateful path into history in the 10th inning of Game 6. Buckner bent at the waist. Then Shea Stadium erupted. The bewilderment in Scully’s voice told the tale. “Behind the bag!” he said. “It gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!”
Scully was back in command two years later as Hershiser, Kirk Gibson and the Stuntmen reached the World Series. Gibson won the National League MVP that season, his first as a Dodger. But he was banged up when Game 1 against Oakland began. He nursed injuries to both legs inside the trainer’s room. It was there he heard Scully inform the viewers Gibson would not appear that evening. “I’m laying on the trainer’s table, and Vin Scully is on TV saying I wasn’t going to play, so I jump up and shout, ‘My ass!’’’ Gibson told The Los Angeles Times in 2017.
Gibson stuffed himself into a uniform and tried to warm up. He dispatched clubhouse attendant Mitch Poole to inform Lasorda that Gibson could pinch hit, if needed. Down a run in the ninth, Lasorda needed him. And so, with a runner on first and two outs, Athletics closer Dennis Eckersley tried a 3-2, back-foot slider to Gibson.
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“The game right now is at the plate,” Scully said. “High fly ball into right field … she is gone!”
The pitch landed in the bleachers. Pandemonium overtook Dodger Stadium. Gibson pumped his fist and limped around the bases. Scully stayed quiet for one minute and six seconds. When his voice returned, he brought the ideal encomium.
“In a year that has been so improbable,” Scully said, “the impossible has happened.”
It would take the Dodgers 32 seasons to capture another championship. Scully called the first 28 of them. As he reached his 70s, he limited his travel schedule to West Coast games. His schedule continued to lighten as he kept going into his 80s. By the end, he only broadcast from California.
“I remember telling Frank McCourt years ago, I said I would like to disappear like a Cheshire cat, where all of a sudden, the only thing left is a smile,” Scully told ESPN in 2012.
If he sought a quiet exit, Scully would be denied. He had decided in August 2015 that 2016 would be his final season. “How much longer can you go fooling people?” he said. The next January, the Los Angeles City Council approved the renaming of Elysian Park Avenue, the street leading off Sunset Boulevard into Dodger Stadium, as Vin Scully Avenue. Scully described the honor as “almost too much to comprehend.”
The entire season served as a celebration of Scully. Opposing players made a pilgrimage to the booth to pose for pictures. He posed for posterity next to David Ortiz and Bryce Harper and Giancarlo Stanton. A visit by Manny Machado and Jonathan Schoop left the players gushing.
“I was shaking a little bit, and as soon as I came in, he called me by my name,” Schoop told The New York Times. “I was like, ‘Oh!’ And as soon as me and Manny got out, I was like — not screaming — but like: ‘Hey, he knew me by my name! He knew everything about me!’ It was really cool.”
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Amid the hoopla, Scully could still spin a yarn. As Giants starter Madison Bumgarner pitched at Dodger Stadium one evening, Scully recounted a tale Bumgarner had told Sports Illustrated years earlier about killing a snake with an axe, only to find two baby jackrabbits inside the rattler. Bumgarner and his wife nursed the rabbits before freeing them back into the wild.
“The moral to the whole story about the rabbit and the snake: You’ve gotta somehow survive, you’ve gotta somehow battle back,” Scully said. “A lesson well taught for all of us.”
The team delivered a fitting conclusion to Scully’s last game at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers were on the verge of besting San Francisco for the 2016 National League West crown. Scully alternated in the bottom of the ninth between the game on the field beneath him and Giants-Padres on a television monitor. When Rockies pitcher Boone Logan supplied Dodgers infielder Charlie Culberson with a belt-high fastball, Scully was ready.
“Swung on, a high fly ball to deep left field,” Scully said. “The Dodger bench empties. Would you believe a home run? And the Dodgers have clinched the division, and will celebrate on schedule.”
Then Scully did what he knew best. He let the fans speak for him. In the postgame bash, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts grabbed the microphone.
“Vin, we love you,” he said. “This is for you, my friend.”
Scully would finish up his career a few days later as the Dodgers visited San Francisco. He turned down overtures to call a playoff inning on a national broadcast. He spoke highly of his successor, Joe Davis, who joined Hershiser in the booth for 2017. “Part of why I took this job is because of how special it was to be the person to follow Vin,” Davis told The Athletic in 2019. “I looked at that as a responsibility.”
The Dodgers placed Scully in their Ring of Honor in 2017. Scully attended games that autumn as the Dodgers returned to the World Series for the first time since the impossible happened during the improbable year of 1988. He enjoyed his retirement, sharing his time with his wife, Sandi. (His first wife, Joan Crawford Scully, died from an accidental overdose in January 1972.) Vin and Sandi golfed and swam together when they weren’t with their children and grandchildren.
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As the pandemic raged in 2020, Scully tried to converse with fans through social media. He was 92 when he debuted on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. He expressed his hope that the discourse would involve “hopefully, nothing controversial.” Scully had vowed a couple years earlier to never again watch the NFL in the wake of Colin Kaepernick’s protest and the burgeoning calls from within the sport for racial justice.
Scully posted regularly during the Dodgers’ run to a title in the fall of 2020. The championship was a welcome distraction in a dark year. The winter was not much better. On Jan. 4, 2021, Sandi Scully died of complications from ALS. The loss of his wife, paired with the death of Lasorda a few days later, was “almost too much to bear,” Scully wrote.
Scully stayed connected with fans as a new season dawned. He answered their questions and posted his memories. The tweeting called to mind how he opened his final broadcast in 2016 — the Dodgers playing the Giants, the same club he had felt pity for all those years ago outside the laundromat in Manhattan — with an Irish benediction.
“May God give you for every storm, a rainbow,” Scully said. “For every tear, a smile. For every care, a promise, and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life sends, a faithful friend to share. For every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer.
“You and I have been friends for a long time. But I know in my heart that I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me. And I’ll miss our time together, more than I can say.”
(Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Getty Images)
