Salon Brilliant Careers | Vin Scully (original) (raw)

For 50 years, an Irish redhead from the Bronx has been the gold standard for baseball announcers.

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By Gary Kaufman

Oct. 12, 1999

Three times in his sensational career has Sandy Koufax walked out to the mound to pitch a fateful ninth where he turned in a no-hitter. But tonight, September the 9th, nineteen hundred and 65, he made the toughest walk of his career, I'm sure, because through eight innings he has pitched a perfect game.

Vin Scully just finished his 50th season broadcasting Dodgers games. I listened in regularly for what at the time was my whole conscious life but was only a dozen or so of those years.

I grew up in Los Angeles. Lots of kids at school rooted for the Oakland A's or the Pittsburgh Pirates, powerhouses of the day. Those teams won a lot (and had cool caps), but you couldn't go home from school and listen to them on the radio. I was an Angeleno, and Dodger blue all the way.

I moved away from my hometown half a lifetime ago, and the one thing I miss about the place, even still, is the sound of Vin Scully's voice, that musical Irish tenor crooning from the transistor radio hidden beneath my pillow after bedtime: Swung on, a hiiiigh drive into deeeep left field. Back goes Henderson, a-waaaay back, to the waaaaaall ... she's gone!

Musical, yes. Vin Scully has the most musical voice in baseball. He doesn't have the clipped, old-time-radio cadence of most broadcasters who date back to the '50s and beyond. Although his timbre is thin, everything is smooth and rounded. The words slide into each other. He has flow. The melody rises and falls on the tide of the game. You can almost hum along to Vin Scully.

He's often referred to as baseball's poet laureate, and those who don't get him parody him by quoting Emerson or spouting flowery language. But even though he will occasionally toss off some verse (he's likely to find the lyrics of an old show tune more apt) or call a cheap base hit "a humble thing, but thine own," the real metaphor for Vin Scully isn't poetry, or even music: It's painting. Other radio announcers can tell you what's happening on the field, and you can imagine it. With Vin Scully, you can see it. His command of the language and the game is so masterful that he always has just the right words to describe what's going on. He paints you a picture. You can't ask another baseball announcer about Scully without hearing a variation on that phrase:

"At times I'll be listening to him and I'll think, Oh, I wish I could call upon that expression the way he does," Dick Enberg has said. "He paints the picture more beautifully than anyone who's ever called a baseball game."

I found a collection of baseball writing once in the library. One of the chapters was a transcript of Scully's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game against the Chicago Cubs in 1965. It read like a short story. It had tension, rising and falling drama, great turns of phrase. It was, and still is, the best piece of baseball writing I've ever seen. And it came off the top of his head, at a moment when, like the man whose feat he was describing, he knew he had to be at the top of his game. I've since heard a tape of that half inning: There's not a single misstep. He never once fumbles for a word, makes a false start or trips over himself.

Fastball, swung on and missed, strike 2. And you can almost taste the pressure now. Koufax lifted his cap, ran his fingers through his black hair, then pulled the cap back down, fussing at the bill. Krug must feel it too as he backs out, heaves a sigh, took off his helmet, put it back on and steps back up to the plate.

It's different now. I've changed my skin. Today I root for the Dodgers' hated rivals, the San Francisco Giants. I have friends who still can't believe it, who don't think it's possible to go from the Dodgers to the Giants, even though the Giants' own manager, Dusty Baker, had his best years in a Dodgers uniform. But it's true. The place in my fan's heart where Jimmy Wynn and Davey Lopes and Steve Garvey and Ron Cey used to live is now occupied by Barry Bonds and J.T. Snow and Jeff Kent and Marvin Benard.

But as wonderful as the Giants' announcers have been while I've rooted for them -- the wry wit of Hank Greenwald and now the impish charm of Jon Miller -- there's still nobody like the redhead. Miller's occasional Scully impersonations only help a little.

You've probably heard Vin Scully even if you don't live in Los Angeles. He's worked for the networks off and on since the late '50s, doing baseball, football and golf, and he's the announcer in the current baseball movie "For Love of the Game." He's OK on TV, but if you haven't heard him broadcast baseball on the radio, you haven't heard him.

For one thing, he works alone, something the Dodgers continue to allow him to do long after it's become fashionable, even required, to have a former player serve as a "color" commentator. On network TV or radio, he always has a partner. For years on NBC's "Game of the Week," his partner was Joe Garagiola, and Scully's instructions to Garagiola when they first teamed up, for an All-Star Game in the mid-'60s, are enlightening: "I said to him, 'Joe, you played a long time, but I've broadcast as many games as you've played, and then some. So if you're gonna talk "inside baseball," you tell the fans the "inside baseball." But don't tell me.'"

Good advice, but impossible. The fact is, when two people are in the booth, they talk to each other. When it's just Vin, he talks to you and me. It's intimate. We're in on it. And Scully's vast knowledge of the game, his incredible store of anecdote both old and new, the fruits of his almost obsessive preparation, need not play second fiddle to some former backstop with strong opinions about when to employ the hit-and-run.

I grew up in a lucky time and place for a kid who liked to listen to sports on the radio. We had Scully doing the Dodgers, Enberg doing the Angels and Rams, the colorful, vocabulary-inventing Chick Hearn doing the Lakers, and Bob Miller, less famous than the others, somehow making hockey action make sense on the radio for the Kings. (All are still there except Enberg, long NBC's plum-assignment guy.) I was spoiled.

I've heard others who grew up listening to Scully say that they never realized how good he was until they traveled around some and heard other announcers. But I knew. Looking back, I think now that Jerry Doggett, the Dodgers' longtime No. 2 announcer, was a pretty fair broadcaster, but he seemed like a clod next to the mellifluous Scully. I could hear the Angels' various broadcasters every night, and sometimes I'd tune in the San Diego Padres on KGB or even the Giants on clear-channel KNBR. Nobody like him. Nobody like the redhead.

The Dodgers defensively in this spine-tingling moment: Sandy Koufax and Jeff Torborg. The boys who will try and stop anything hit their way: Wes Parker, Dick Tracewski, Maury Wills and John Kennedy; the outfield of Lou Johnson, Willie Davis and Ron Fairly. And there's 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.

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