This weekend in San Francisco, the world’s longest broadcasting career will come to a close. The Giants, in their pursuit of a wild card playoff berth, will host the Los Angeles Dodgers. These will be the final three games of the regular season for the Giants and Dodgers and the final three games for one of the greatest baseball icons of all-time, Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, who will retire at the age of 88.
LA Times
This past Sunday was a gorgeous fall day in the City of the Angels and it was the official Dodger Stadium farewell for the loquacious legend. In front of 51,962 fans, he Dodgers were playing the Colorado Rockies with the opportunity to clinch their fourth straight National League West title. In the bottom of the 10th inning, in a tie game, with two outs and nobody on base, a virtually unknown journeyman 2nd baseman named Charlie Culberson hit a game-winning, walk off home run to end the legend’s Dodger Stadium career in style.
The entire day was an homage to the team’s longtime announcer. Each Dodger player, when coming to the plate for the first time, looked up to the press box and tipped their helmet to honor Scully. In the aftermath of the division clinching win, the ceremony was appropriately more about the venerable Vin than it was about the team. Scully, clearly moved and eternally humble, took the microphone and reminded the adoring fans that he always “needed you far more than you needed me.”
officialvinscully.com
Vincent Edward Scully was born on November 29, 1927 in The Bronx and grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Living a short walk from the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants until 1957, Scully grew up a Giants fan and, at Fordham University in The Bronx, started his broadcasting career. At the age of 22, in 1950, the red haried Scully joined another legendary redhead, Red Barber, in the broadcast booth for the Brooklyn Dodgers (ironic since he was a Giants fan). Scully followed the team to Los Angeles in 1958 and he never left, until now.
67 years with one team. When we talk about baseball records that will never be broken, that’s an announcing record that will almost certainly never be matched. When Scully started doing Dodger games, Jackie Robinson was only in his fourth year in the league, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle had yet to debut in the big leagues, Joe DiMaggio was still playing, Harry Truman was president, Ronald Reagan had yet to turn 40, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were infants. Scully established such a pedigree that he was inducted into the Broadcaster’s wing of National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982 as the Ford C. Frick Award recipient, 34 years before he would retire from the craft. In his career, Scully would ultimately be at the microphone for 25 World Series match-ups.
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Considering that he will forever be remembered as a baseball announcer, it’s ironic that my own personal Vin Scully experience started by watching him broadcast NFL games and golf events. Scully announced NFC games for CBS Sports from 1975 to 1982 and it’s during that time that his name became familiar to me. Scully participated in the telecasts for The Masters during that time and was generally the lead for the #2 team for the NFL (behind Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier), mostly working with Hank Stram. Most people have likely forgotten that it was Scully, not Summerall, who anchored CBS’ coverage of The Masters for those eight years. Probably the most famous non-baseball event that Scully called was the 1982 NFC Championship game between the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers, a game immortalized by “The Catch” by the Niners’ Dwight Clark.
As a kid (born in 1967) who grew up in New York and Connecticut and started watching sports in 1975, I had no idea whatsoever that Scully was the voice of the Dodgers. For me, the voices of Major League Baseball were NBC’s Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek, the Mets’ Lindsey Nelson, Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy, and the Yankees’ Phil Rizzuto, Bill White and Frank Messer. Scully called All-Star Games and the World Series for CBS Radio in the late 1970’s but I saw all those games on television.
Scully didn’t start calling baseball games on TV at the national level until he was hired by NBC Sports in 1983 as a newly minted Hall of Famer; that’s when I and millions of others first became aware of where his true passion lied. Scully worked with Garagiola on four All-Star Games, four National League Championship Series’ and three World Series (1984, 1986 and 1988). It was in ’86 and ’88 that Scully called two of the greatest moments in the history of the sport, the ball that went through Bill Buckner’s legs in Game 6 between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox in ’86 and Kirk Gibson’s improbable pinch-hit, walk-off home run in Game 1 of the ’88 Series between the Dodgers and Oakland A’s. In his role as the Dodgers announcer, Scully also called memorable moments such as Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, Barry Bonds’ 71st, Don Larsen’s perfect game in the ’56 World Series, and Sandy Koufax’s four no-hitters.
It’s fitting I suppose, for an 88-year-old broadcaster, that Vin Scully is a bit of an anachronism. For the last several decades on Dodger games, Scully has been mostly a solo artist in a sport that virtually always features a duo. All TV and radio booths for baseball (and other sports) typically involve two or three announcers, usually a play-by-play man and a color analyst or two, most often somebody who played the game. Scully never needed a color man; he provided all the color you could ever want. There has never been and likely never will be a wordsmith to match the eminent Scully. Always chock full of tidbits and factoids, the silver tongued redhead was a master at weaving an anecdote around the play by play of the moment. If William Shakespeare were reincarnated on earth in America and became a baseball fan, no doubt the Bard’s favorite announcer would be the verbose Vin.
It’s an irony for me personally that I never met Vin Scully, despite a 12-year career at ESPN, three of them in which I was the Coordinating Producer for Up Close, a talk show with a studio just six miles from Dodger Stadium. Scully, always a modest man, never wanted the story to be about him, it was always about the game. Our show was famous for getting into the personal lives of the guests and that was something Scully was never comfortable talking about. While I never met Scully, during the few times that I was assigned to the press box at Dodger Stadium, I felt like I was watching royalty walk by when he would stroll into the press box that would eventually bear his name.
It’s been a shame for Dodger fans and baseball fans alike that many of us have been unable to watch Vin’s final three years of broadcasts because of a business dispute between the 24-hour Dodger Channel SportsNet and multiple cable and satellite providers. As a Verizon FIOS subscriber, I’ve been blacked out for three years; it’s ironic that I’ve been able to watch up to 14 different games per day but not the Dodgers’ games. I’ve been able to listen to the announcers from 29 different teams but not the greatest of them all and that’s a shame. Fortunately, an agreement was reached to simulcast six of Scully’s final telecasts on the local station KTLA, affording me and other Angelenos the opportunity to hear Vin’s final words.
Vin Scully’s final broadcast will be on Sunday at AT&T Park in San Francisco, 59 days shy of his 89th birthday. We should all be so lucky to do something we love for 67 years in a row. Enjoy your retirement, Vin, and and enjoy an abundance of very pleasant afternoons or evenings, wherever you may be.
For yours and my enjoyment, here are some links to Vin Scully’s memorable calls over the years.
Thanks for reading.
Chris Bodig