THE VOICE VIN SCULLY IS DODGERS BASEBALL
2 • THE VOICE ForewordContents������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3 Appreciation ����������������������������������������������������������������� 5 A Life Well Lived �������������������������������������������� 21 Ah, the Stories ����������������������������������������������������� 29 His Words Were Music ����������������������57 Adapting to the Times ������������������������� 65 LA Says Thank You ���������������������������������� 77 The Announcement ����������������������������������� 85 The Final Games �������������������������������������������� 89 Retirement reflections ��������������������������115 What He Taught Us ������������������������������ 127 LA Says Goodbye �������������������������������������� 145 The Calls ���������������������������������������������������������������������� 153 Copyright © 2022 by the Los Angeles Times All Rights Reserved • ISBN: 978-1-63846-042-8 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner or the publisher. Published by Pediment Publishing, a division of The Pediment Group, Inc. • www.pediment.com Printed in Canada. This book is not endorsed by Major League Baseball or the Los Angeles Dodgers. FRONT COVER: The genius that was Vin Scully can not be put in words, but somehow if he were to describe himself, which he would never do, it would be the closest you could come to describing his talent and impact on Los Angeles. PAUL MORSE / LOS ANGELES TIMES Credits Los Angeles Times EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN Patrick Soon-Shiong PRESIDENT/CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Chris Argentieri EXECUTIVE EDITOR Kevin Merida EDITOR AT LARGE Scott Kraft DEPUTY MANAGING EDITORS Christian Stone, Julia Turner ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR/ SPORTS EDITOR Iliana Limón Romero ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITORS Houston Mitchell, Hans Tesselaar ‘THE VOICE’ EDITOR John Cherwa EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Calvin Hom PHOTO EDITOR Kelvin Kuo EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/ BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & COMMERCE Lee Fentress DIRECTOR OF COMMERCE Samantha Smith COMMERCE COORDINATOR Kailen Locke GENERAL COUNSEL Jeff Glasser
Some of Scully’s most memorable calls and“Allquotes:year long they looked to him [Kirk Gibson] to light the fire, and all year long he answered the demands. High fly ball into right field. She is gone! [pause] In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”“There’sa high bouncer over the mound, over second base, Mantilla’s up with it, throws low and wild … Hodges scores. We go to Chicago! [crowd noise for a nice long while] The Cinderella team [1959 Los Angeles Dodgers] of the National League.”
“There’s a little roller up along first, behind the bag! It gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!” — 1986 World Series“Andre
“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.”
Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. [pause] Aren’t we all?”
FOREWORD • 3 FOREWORD
Vin Scully wins vote as biggest icon in the history of Los Angeles sports
The Times held a monthlong March Madness-style tournament in which 128 entrants were divided and seeded into four 32-person regionals (baseball, basketball, football and wild card). Scully, who easily won the baseball regional, defeated the legendary Rams defensive unit of the late 1960s, the Fearsome Foursome, in one semifinal of the final four. That left him to face Lakers great Magic Johnson in the final after Johnson defeated Jackie Robinson in the other semifinal matchup. Scully defeated Johnson 62.1%-37.9%.
HOUSTON MITCHELL • MAY 26, 2020
Vin Scully was the voice of the Dodgers for several generations, and Times readers recognized it by voting him as the biggest icon in the history of L.A. sports.
— on Bob Gibson “He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom“RobertoGlavineClemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.” His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster: “You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; 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, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”
WHAT VIN SCULLY MEANS TO ME Before Vin Scully’s last season as Dodger announcer, The Times’ Dodgers Dugout newsletter asked readers to send in their thoughts about him, trying to discover what Vin Scully meant to Dodger fans and others. The responses ran throughout the season in the newsletter. It’s clear that Scully’s bond with listeners everywhere went deeper than just a talking head on radio and television. There was a personal connection that in some cases, lasted a lifetime. We’ve pulled some of them for inclusion in this book. Throughout the book, you’ll see a few QR codes that will take you to some visual trib utes to Scully, including some memorable calls.
More than 45,000 votes were cast for the final.Scully joined the Dodgers in 1950, working alongside Radio Hall of Famer and baseball legend Red Barber. In 1976, Dodgers fans voted Scully the “most memorable personal ity” in Los Angeles Dodgers history. When the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958, they played at the Coliseum, which wasn’t designed for baseball and had some poor sight lines. Because some fans had such difficulty following the action there, and oth ers had never watched much baseball, they began bringing transistor radios to games and listening to Scully while they were watching. Scully was inducted into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982 and retired after the 2016 season, ending a 67-season career. If Joe Davis, who essentially succeeded Scully, remains with the Dodgers as long as Scully did, Davis’ last season with the team would be 2083.
APPRECIATION • 9
For those of us who didn’t meet him until later, it was an intriguing peek back at a time before he became a grandfatherly storyteller and network star. He had witnessed so much of baseball history and he was still here, a gift to us Hearingall.about Scully’s passing August 2 at age 94 led me to pull out the book again and to recall staring at those photographs all over the living room floor. As fans, we knew Scully for a long time. We heard and watched him for decades and laughed at his stories, even after we’d heard them many times and we knew them almost as well as he did. Though we had the pleasure of his company for such a long time, it still wasn’t longAmongenough.the best photos of him that made it into the book was of a serious Scully, his face almost cartoonishly thin and long and his ears sticking out, facing a TV camera alongside his friend Stein. Shown the photo decades later, Scully guessed that it had been taken between games of a doubleheader, in the TV studio set up in the basement of Ebbets Field. In another photo, taken in 1957, he was broadcasting a game at Ebbets Field, looking toward the action through protective wire.
Memories of 1950s Scully photos on my living room floor still linger
OPPOSITE: Vin Scully’s career extended well beyond the Dodgers. He broadcast the NFL on CBS, shown here on his first day in 1978 with Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, left, and Hall of Fame coach George Allen. ASSOCIATED PRESS
HELENE ELLIOTT • AUG. 2, 2022 Vin Scully was all over my living room floor for a few months, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled. To be truthful, it wasn’t Scully himself sprawled on the carpet. My husband was collaborating on a book based on photo graphs taken by Barney Stein, who was the Brooklyn Dodgers’ team photographer from 1937 through 1957, and images of a young Scully were among the photographs scattered over our floor. How to choose which ones to publish, when there were dozens more wonderful photos than there could be pages in the book? Not every photo made it into “Through a Blue Lens: The Brooklyn Dodger photo graphs of Barney Stein,” but every photo in the book is a gem. There’s Carl Erskine — blessedly still with us at age 95 — Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges. They were captured in their youth, at their athletic peak. Growing up in Brooklyn after the team left for Los Angeles in 1958, I’d heard stories about the hapless Bums. These photos added a new dimension to those stories, made them more vivid, more real. The photos of Scully, though, pulled me back to look at them again and again during the selection process and well after the 2007 publication of the book, which was a col laboration between Barney Stein’s daughter Bonnie Crosby and my husband, Dennis D’Agostino.Ican’texplain why those Scully shots fasci nated me. Maybe it was because he was a liv ing connection to a time I’d only heard about, a link to long-gone relatives who had told me about a much-loved baseball team that played in Brooklyn on a site I knew only for having unremarkable apartment buildings. Maybe it was because of the clarity of the photos, which captured Scully’s essence so well, so lovingly. He was hired as a Dodgers broadcaster in 1950, and he is as young in those photos as the standout players whose feats he described at Ebbets Field.
Jerry Doggett sat to his left. Scully was using a microphone but had no headset. He didn’t use a headset until he got to Los Angeles, resorting to it, he said, in part because of “the feedback from the transistor radios” in the stands that were tuned to his calls. Maybe my favorite photo portrays him crouching in the Dodgers’ dugout before a game. He’s sharply dressed in a blazer, tie, sunglasses, and shiny penny loafers. Stein’s camera caught him in mid-sentence, his mouth open. Whatever he was saying had the full attention of Hodges, who was crouching nearby, leaning on a bat. Framed behind them is the distinctive Ebbets Field scoreboard.Scullydidn’t recall the date or the topic of conversation on that long-ago day. “Probably with a couple of writers as well,” he said. “It was simpler in those days, where you could sit and hang out in the dugout and shoot
the breeze and then go upstairs and do the game. Especially when it was radio. [With] television, I have to be there early to get all the stuff out of the way and then tape. So this was just one of those days, just hanging out.” By reducing his travel schedule and his workload he managed to hang out with us for 67 seasons, through 2016. But as the years passed, many of the players, executives and writers he had known fell victim to age or illness. The deaths of his second wife, Sandi, and former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda within a few days of each other early in January 2021 must have left Scully feeling terribly alone. He grieved privately, this man who had lived his life so publicly and so well. He’s gone but he won’t be forgotten as long as video and audio recordings of his warm, rich voice exist in some form for us and future generations to enjoy. As long as it’s time for Dodger baseball, he will live in our hearts as well as in those marvelous photos that so briefly but memorably covered my living room floor.
JAYNE KAMIN / LOS ANGELES TIMES
ROBERT GAUTHIER / LOS ANGELES TIMES
OPPOSITE: The looks might appear to be grim in this moment, but the Guggenheim Group infused a lot of cash into the Dodgers after this 2012 announcement of their purchase of the storied franchise. Scully is joined by former manager Tommy Lasorda and former first baseman Steve Garvey.
10 • THE VOICE RIGHT: Jerry Doggett made the move west from Brooklyn as the other part of the Dodgers radio announcing team. Here they are in 1985 in spring training in Vero Beach, Fla. Doggett and Scully, who started working together in 1950, were on the same broadcast for 32 years before Doggett retired. Doggett died in 1997 at age 80.
APPRECIATION • 11
AH, THE STORIES • 29
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRANK!” roared thousands.Secory’s face looked as if he’d just been buzzed by a 727. The crowd giggled with delight, eminently pleased with their little game and its instigator, Scully. All of which goes to show you that Dodger Stadium is Vinnie’s. Even players from visiting teams worship at Scully’s Shrine. One was Cincinnati Reds’ reliever George Culver, who would no sooner take his seat in the bullpen without his transistor than he would without his glove. One night, the Reds had a pitcher warming up in the bullpen but Scully’s view was blocked. Scully knew George listened, so he said over the air, “Hey, George, if that’s Granger warming up, give us a wave.” Culver waved.
All those people hanging on every word can be intimidating. “It’s strange knowing that thousands of people are listening to you describe a play they are watching,” Scully says, but Scully says he’s never had a letter from somebody who was there saying he got it wrong.Andtransistor power can be good for kicks, too. Once, during a particularly dull game in 1960, Scully noticed in the press guide that one of the day’s umpires, Frank Secory, was celebrating a birthday. Vinnie thought it would be fun if every body listening in the stands paid the man in blue a tribute. “I’ll count to three,” Scully said, “and everybody yell, ‘Happy Birthday, Frank!’ ” One, two, three … counted Scully.
And so, the show leads him on. The most transfixing, regaling, entertaining show in baseball carries elegantly on. For that, baseball fans must be forever in debted. Not, of course, as forever indebted as Dodger President Peter O’Malley, who shells out an estimated $750,000 per year for a man who is, essentially, a part-time employee. O’Malley at least has company. The book keeper at NBC pays Scully approximately the same size stipend to work the “Game of the Week” and six golf tournaments a year. That’s $1.5 million a year, with winters off and no heavy lifting. After 36 years, Vinnie has become every body’s friend. Does Los Angeles love Vinnie? Does Lasorda bleed white clam sauce? Or, as a Mr. G.G. Gundry of Malibu writes in: “If Vin Scully announced lawn bowing, I would listen.” No, Vinnie doesn’t do the Dodgers. Vinnie is the Dodgers — more than Lasorda or Sax or, yeah, even Mr. Potato Head. Vinnie has that certain papal infallibility about him. As Lasorda himself once put it: “Davey Lopes hits a line drive off the wall, comes flying around second and slides head-first into third and not one person in the stadium believes it until Vinnie tells them it’s true.”
PRESS AH, THE STORIES
The Vin Scully Show, now embarking on its 36th year with the Dodgers, rolls on and on, with each new reviewer gushing more than the last. Fifty-seven summers aren’t much betrayed in his ruddy-red Irish face. Neither is the sadness when he smiles, which, by nature and by design, is practically always.
Yeah, even Vin Scully, master-weaver of high drama and happy endings, has his sadnesses. But sorrow makes for lousy theater — on the air and off — and if there is one thing Scully can’t stand it’s lousy theater. “I’m the great cover-up,” Scully says. “I don’t talk about my sadness. I guess the psychiatrists might say that I need to purge myself of that. But I can’t. I’d rather tell them a joke. I have to do it my way. I can’t allow the sadness to lead me on.”
PAUL CONNORS / ASSOCIATED
OPPOSITE: It was a familiar sight. Vin Scully in his spot in the broadcast booth. Perfectly dressed with a matching tie and pocket square.
As longtime voice of the Dodgers, he’s never been at loss for words
RICK REILLY • APRIL 8, 1985
This is not much of an exaggeration, even for Lasorda. Scully may be the single-largest influence on transistor radio sales in Los Angeles. In fact, so many people pack a radio to Dodger games that KABC engineers often have to adjust for the noise of Vinnie’s voice cascading up from the stands into the booth.
Scully appeals to the truck driver and the English lit professor alike. He knows his way around homers and Homer, Shakespeare and stickball. If Scully says an errant shortstop is like “The Ancient Mariner — he stoppeth one of three,” one minute, then the next he’s describing a change-up that “squirts out like a wet bar of soap.” Los Angeles has lapped it up since 1958, when the Dodgers came to town with Scully running interference. He turned Los Angeles into a transistor town, first and forever. Forget video, from April to October for 27 years, Scully’s mellifluous musings have drifted up from every traffic jam and outdoor cafe, every limousine and ice cream truck. The portable Vinnie. Unless, of course, he’s doing the TV broadcast on Channel 11. Then it’sFansVinnieVision.respect Vinnie, because Vinnie respects the fans. Vinnie does not scream at you. Vinnie does not numb you with
30 • THE VOICE RIGHT:
One of Vin Scully’s most famous calls was that of Hank Aaron hitting his 715th home run, breaking the then record of Babe Ruth. It came against the Dodgers as Al Downing served up the historic home run. In typical Scully fashion, he let the crowd noise tell most of the story.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
“Thanks, George,” Scully said. Scully can get away with that stuff. He is as comfortable as your favorite college sweat shirt. Flip on the car radio and you can almost see him riding shotgun, swapping stories, affecting no pretensions or style ex cept the simple feel of himself. It is for that reason Scully never — never — listens to other broadcasters. Scully doesn’t want to be Marv Albert or Lindsey Nelson or Joe Piscopo. Scully just wants to be Scully.
When Henry Aaron was one home run away from hitting his 715th and breaking Babe Ruth’s record, it so happened that the Dodgers were in Atlanta for the game. Al Downing was on the mound for the Dodgers and Scully was at the mike.
To some, Scully’s call, or lack thereof, was pure genius, but to Scully it was child’s play.
“I remember, when I was growing up, we had one of those huge, old radios at home that sat high enough off the ground so that I was able to crawl up under it, actually under it,” Scully says. “I’d sit under there for hours with a box of Saltines and a carton of milk and listen to guys like Ted Husing and Bill Stern do college football. Games like Georgia TechNavy, Mississippi-Mississippi State, which I should not have cared the least about, but was enthralled with. It didn’t matter to me. I used to just love to hear the roar of the crowd wash over me. And I knew if I ever got the chance to broadcast, I’d let the crowd be the bigWhenthing.”the Dodgers won the 1959 pennant, Scully’s classy line is remembered, perhaps even more than the feat he described: “We go to WhenChicago.”Scully’s favorite Dodger team won the first and last pennant for Flatbush in 1955 and then went on to win the World Series, Scully still kept his cool: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.” Later, people would ask Scully how he remained so calm. “If I’d said another word, I’d have broken down crying,” he would say. If knowing when to swallow words is an art, knowing how to release them is a gift. They say radio is like skywriting. The words, once spoken, merely float away to the winds, lost forever. But only Scully can still the sky. And now we take time out for a quickie Dodger quiz: Q: This Dodger was voted Most Memorable of all time in a 1976 poll of fans. He was born to immigrant parents in a poor section of a big city, worked his way to na tional fame, pals around with the President, is usually whistling something or other, is in perpetual mid-story and can sometimes be found saying something like, “Only in a country as great as ours, could a kid from (your hometown here) make it big… .”
VIN SCULLY
On Scully’s most lavish Christmas he re ceived a bicycle. “It was stolen in two days,” “ I used to just love to hear the roar of the crowd wash over me. And I knew if I ever got the chance to broadcast, I’d let the crowd be the big thing.
AH, THE STORIES • 31 numbers. Vinnie does not try to impress you. You’ll never hear Vinnie giving it the big Hollywood High Five in the booth, as in: Well, what do you know? Look who just dropped by the old homestead. If it isn’t Bobby. Folks, say hello to Bobby De Niro. Nor will Vinnie rail at umpires, root for the home team (Cub fans shudder here), or rag the visitors. And, most of all, Vinnie will give you nothing when nothing will do just fine.
When that most celebrated of fly balls cleared the fence, Scully barked, “It’s gone!,” then did a curious thing. He motioned for the engineer to open up the crowd microphone, rose from his chair, walked to the back of the broad casting booth, poured himself a glass of water and drank it.
TheSlowly.roar lasted more than two minutes and those two minutes got along just fine without anybody having to add insightful commentary such as: I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!
Can you name him? If you said Tommy Lasorda, go directly home and watch six straight hours of Chicago Brothers pizza commercials. If you said Vin Scully, may all your skies be Dodger Blue. Hard to believe, but Scully, the son of a silk salesman, was born in the Bronx, New York, to humble surroundings.WhenScully was seven years old, his father died of pneumonia and the family moved to a fifthfloor walk-up apartment house in Brooklyn, near the George Washington Bridge. It’s the 181st Street stop if you’re on the subway. His mother later married a reserved, pipe-smoking Englishman who worked as a doorman near Central Park in Manhattan.“Weweren’t real poor, but we weren’t quite middle class, either,” Scully remembers. “I remember my stepfather used to come home sometimes with a pair of pants. One of the tenants at the apartment where he worked would hand him a pair and say, ‘Hey, Al, don’t you have a son these might fit?’ And he’d bring them home to me.”
OPPOSITE: Vin Scully spent most of his career as the sole announcer, but that doesn’t mean he was the only one in the booth. Here, in 1963, he is shown with statistician Allan Roth preparing to call the next inning of a Dodgers game. I remember I’d stand out there and broadcast the games — to myself, although sometimes the priests sitting behind me in the stands would hear me and laugh. But I kept right on.
32 • THE VOICE
Scully eventually went to Fordham Prep, then to Fordham University, where he worked on the school paper, ran the school radio station, wrote stringer stories for the New York Times and played for the Fordham baseball team, for which he contributed a decent center field, swung a fickle bat, but exhibited the best adenoids on the team.
HAROLD FILAN / ASSOCIATED PRESS “
Now stepping in there, Vince Scully, about a .270 hitter, bats right. A skinny, carrot-topped kid. Appears to be hosting a freckle convention on his face. Just a punch hitter, he likes to whittle away at you. He’s the kind of kid you chuckle at when he comes to the plate, but you look at the box score the next day and you find out he went 2 for 4 against you. On the base paths, he’s nettlesome. Not necessarily fast, but quick. A pretty good fielder, though I can’t see this kid playing much outside the walls of dear ol’ Fordham U. Which is exactly right. Scully didn’t. He spent two years in the Navy, then came back to Fordham and graduated in 1949. His num ber was not retired. That summer Scully got his break. Pressed for a warm body, Red Barber of CBS Radio told his aide to call “that red-haired fellow” he’d met once upon a time to help fill in on the bulbcountingwearingcoldtheInstead,fromScullyit,Scully,University-MarylandBostongame.21,wasgladtodobutbecauseofamix-up,wasn’tgoingtodoitabroadcastingbooth.hehadtoworkfromroofofthestadiumonaandwind-whippedday,onlyalightcoatandupona60-wattforhissolesourceof light and heat.
Which gives us pause. What if Scully the Voice had to introduce Scully the Player?
Scully’s mother asked a doctor for help. The doctor sent a note to the sisters explaining to them that if God had want ed young Vincent to favor his right hand, God would have made him right-hand ed. But since young Vincent most definitely wanted to use his left hand, the sisters must not mess with God’s work. And from that point on, they Scullydidn’t.wasnever without employment, inglorious as it sometimes was. He delivered the Bronx Home News. He pushed garment racks through Manhattan. He delivered mail. He delivered milk. And, of course, he worked the Silver Room at the Stadler Hotel. The Silver Room? One day a man walked up to a group of teen-agers and inquired as to who among them would like to work the Silver Room at the hotel. That sounded pretty glamorous to Scully, so he raised his hand. The Silver Room! Scully could see himself now. Dressed
“Come with me,” the man said. He took Scully back to a hot, steamy little room where, cascading through a hole in the ceil ing, came dirty silverware from the hotel restaurant. The lucky young gentlemen in the Silver Room were granted the distinct privilege to wash it.
“I remember I’d stand out there and broadcast the games — to myself, although sometimes the priests sitting behind me in the stands would hear me and laugh,” he said. “But I kept right on.”
VIN SCULLY
in tails at the maitre d’ stand of the Silver Room. Table for two? Right this way.
he said. When Scully eventually made his television debut, his family had to walk down to the neighborhood saloon to witness it. They didn’t own a television. Ironically, the loquacious Scully almost turned out to be a stutterer. The sisters at his Catholic elementary school believed left-handedness to be a vice cured best by a ruler rap across the knuckles. Scully was a natural left-hander. The strain caused when a natural left-hander is forced to use nothing but his right hand was starting to show up in Scully’s speech pattern — he was starting to Eventually,stutter.
“Yet not once did that boy complain about how cold he was or how he couldn’t see,” remembers Barber, now living in Tallahassee, Fla. In fact, Scully didn’t even complain the following Monday when he saw Barber in the CBS offices. Scully’s misfortunes were retold to Barber later that week. “I was very impressed about that,” Barber says. By 1950, Barber had offered Scully the job of replacing Ernie Harwell on the Dodger broadcasts, to be the No. 3 man behind Barber and Connie Desmond. But when Desmond left, Scully moved up to No. 2.
By the beginning of the 1954 season, Barber had jumped to the New York Yankees and the Dodgers had themselves a brand-new No. 1 golden-throat, Vince Scully, age 26. The show has not stopped since. And now for the mortal side of Vinnie. Scully has been criticized for cherishing good theater at the expense of reporting the news. The night before the baseball strike was to begin in 1981, he failed to tell his listeners that the strike would begin the next day. Instead, he hyped the game the next night, even though it most obviously would not be played. “The people were sick of hearing about the strike,” Scully says in defenseWhentoday.Times columnist Scott Ostler chastised him for it and for other examples of protecting the Dodger image, mail ran 10 to 1 in favor of Scully, all of which proved one thing: Given a choice, the people would rather have Vinnie than the truth. Not that Vinnie doesn’t tell the truth; it’s just that Vinnie, like any good master of ceremonies, sometimes fails to mention that the lead singer will perform tonight with a doozy of a hang over. “If you knew something lousy about your managing editor, would you print it?” Scully asks a writer. “I work for the Dodgers. They sign my check.”
Some think Scully an egotist because he insists that the Dodgers operate on the one man/one mike theory. That is, though there are three members of the Dodger radio and TV broadcast team — Scully, Jerry Doggett and Ross Porter — you will never hear any two voices on the same broadcast at the same time. But there was a time, when Porter first ar rived, in 1976, that O’Malley allowed Porter and Doggett to try two on the air at once.
AH, THE STORIES • 33
“That was the way I’d been used to,” Porter says. “But after about a week, Peter said, ‘It’s
“I just refuse to allow my feelings to show… . I’m the great coverup. Why? I don’t know. It’s not like I’m trying to spare everybody else the burden. It’s just that I was taught not to show my emotions….
Lasorda always says to me: ‘You’re always happy.’ Well, I’m not always happy, but I try to act like I am.
OPPOSITE: This was another perfect inning in the perfect game with the perfect call. Here Sandy Koufax pitches to Chris Krug of the Chicago Cubs in the top of the ninth inning. Vin Scully’s call of this inning has remained a masterpiece never equaled. Spoiler alert: Koufax got Krug out.
Scully immersed his sorrow in his work. As always, he did not miss an assignment with the Dodgers. He flew to Vero Beach in February and carried on. Scully always carries on. Two years later, he remarried, and today the Scully family counts eight, more than enough. They are Vin and Sandi, his new wife, Sandi’s two kids from a previous mar riage (Todd, 20 and Kelly, 16), Scully’s three from Joan, and one of their own, 10-year-old Catherine.Butitis in Erin, 16, his last daughter by Joan, that Vin is faced with a laughing, dancing, giggling reminder of his Joan. For Erin, dark and handsome, looks strikingly like her late mother.
One, Scully can out-sell Ed McMahon. Two, if you’re Peter O’Malley, you like to stretch every dollar out of your part-time help. And then there was a magazine writer who complained that Scully started too many sentences with “So … “ as in “So, on a shimmering summer night, the tension runs so taut that even the moon peeks out from behind a cloud to get a look.”
When”
34 • THE VOICE
“I see Joan in everything Erin does,” Scully says. “I love that. For that, I will cherish her forever.”Inthe 13 years since Joan’s death, Scully has rarely talked of it, even with Sandi. “I guess I’m a pretty good actor,” he says. “I can be down and make myself cheerful.
The other thing is, if you’re out looking for flaws, Scully will gladly save you the trouble. Nobody likes to tell a joke on himself more thanSuchVinnie.asthe time he and his wife, Sandi, were taking a trip. Scully packed the luggage in the trunk of the car and off they went. All along the freeway, an inordinate number of citizens were waving and pointing, honking horns and flashing lights. Naturally, Scully thought they were fans, who really do honk and wave and flash lights at him, though even this seemed a bit much. But, as Scully says, “I thought I was just having an especially good day with my public.” When Scully finally got out of the car, he realized he’d left a suitcase on the roof of the car and people were just trying to call it to his attention, without much luck. “Boy, did I feel stupid.” That humility runs deep. When Scully was inducted into the broadcaster’s wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, the Dodgers saluted him with a Vin Scully Night at Dodger Stadium. When he was introduced, the faithful gave him a huge and lengthy standing ovation. When the roar finally subsided, Scully stepped to the microphone, looked up at the people and said, “It’s only me.” Scully knows from whence he came. For all his dulcet tones he has his sorrows. Her name was Joan Crawford, not a movie star but with the mystique of one — rich in beauty, dark eyes, dark hair, a model’s face. Reared in Massachusetts, she was working as a model in New York in 1957 when an advertising buddy of Scully’s set her up with Vinnie on a blind date. As things will hap pen, they were married the next year. That was 1958, a most eventful one for Scully, since the Dodgers moved west that year. The Scullys and the Dodgers began life anew in LosJoanAngeles.andVinnie had three kids — Michael, Kevin and Erin — and his love for those four began to make him rue life on the road with the“IDodgers.hatetosee days and nights go by without seeing the family,” he said in 1969. “Time is the most precious thing of all, and I hate to squander it.” But he had made it through another season, 1971, and was bracing himself for another when, at 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 26, 1972, he was awakened by the barking of a dog. When he turned to check on Joan, she was dead.The coroner’s report said that Joan Scully had taken an accidental overdose of medica tion prescribed to her to help her rest from a severe cold and bronchitis.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
To this, Scully fans say, “So what?” Scully can order breakfast with so for all they care as long as what follows gives them goose bumps. (Come to think of it, Scully probably could do just that: “So, on a maaaaaaaaarvelous day for French Toast, I am reminded of Moliere, who said… .”)
Scully jumped from CBS to NBC two years ago and was paired with Joe Garagiola, “people said it would be two giant egos clashing, two guys fighting for the mike,” Garagiola says. “But the first time Vin and I talked, we decided, ‘Hey, we’re professionals. Let’s work it out.’ And we did.”
working OK, but let’s go back to the old way.’
Where Scully takes cheap shots is when people, hunting for chinks in the armor, hit a wall and begin picking nits, such as the rap that Scully sells too much stuff on the air.
“My mother was an unemotional person.
AH, THE STORIES • 35
TIMES
ASSOCIATED PRESS
RIGHT: Frank and Jamie (far right) McCourt stand with Vin Scully and his wife as he was honored with a plaque before the Dodger’s game against the Boston Red Sox at the Coliseum on March 29, 2008. SHEPLER ANGELES OPPOSITE: Vin Scully seemed ageless throughout his 67-year career. In this photograph in 1980, he didn’t look a lot different than he did in his later years.
LORI
She was not the type to put her arms around me. And my stepfather was very much the contented, quiet Englishman. That’s why it’s hard for me. I can’t go all the way. I can’t reveal all my feelings. I could never bare my soul.“Maybe I’ve kept it in too much, but I can’t look back. I don’t need a catharsis. I don’t need a cleansing. I’ve handled it in my own way. That’s just me. I have to do it my way. I can’t allow the sadness to lead me on.”
/ LOS
When Scully gets depressed, he plunges himself into his work and so it was that he reached up to the overhead bin and pulled down his briefcase to do some. When he opened it, he found a Snickers candyYes,bar.ladies and gentlemen, here was Vin Scully, millionaire businessman, baseball’s storyteller, distinguished journalist, Peabody Award Winner and Hall of Fame resident, sitting in the first-class cabin of an airplane with a Snickers bar. He took it out. There was a note attached. It read: Dear Daddy, We’ll Miss You, Love, Us. As Scully looked up, anybody could see in his eyes that, for at least this one moment, the show did not go on.
36 • THE VOICE
On his way to Vero Beach in mid-March for the 36th time, Scully, heavy-hearted and looking into the teeth of another eight-month season, plunked down in his seat in the firstclass cabin and looked, for once, almost unhappy.“Youget to thinking, ‘Well, here I go for two more weeks on the road.’ I figured it all out once and I realized that in my career, I’ve been away from home for something like three full years. Three years. That gets to you. That gets depressing.”
WHAT VIN SCULLY MEANS TO ME
AH, THE STORIES • 37
Simply put he was my refuge, my comfort. As a child growing up in a home that was broken by mental illness, there were many fearful nights. I cannot count the number of times my sister and I were in the same room fearful of what we heard beyond the door. As I would lay there, I would turn on the transistor radio to drown out the yelling and listen to the baseball game. I loved baseball and I loved the Dodgers. To a young boy growing up in East Los Angeles the Dodgers were all my idols. Out of that radio I would hear a calming voice describe the game. The voice would take my thoughts far away from my fear, taking me to a place where my imagination and dreams could overcome. With every descriptive word I heard I could believe that it was me out there making that play with Maury or Jim or Wes or Ron or Tommy or Willie or Lou or Don or Sandy. I felt I was no longer in this fearful place but rather in a place where I was safe and doing what I loved. In listening to the voice I could feel that I was far away and yet right there. I could let my imagination go and dream that maybe one of my idols would take me away from this fearful place and be my Dad for after all I know them all so personally through that voice. Somehow as the game would progress all of the bad around me became nonexistent and a small boy could fall asleep and dream of good things.
John A Congestio
Narration is a severe understatement. Masterpiece is a better depiction. The call of the ninth inning of Koufax’s perfect game is regarded as the ultimate display of Scully’s mastery of his craft, and perhaps the finest call in baseball history. It is not one moment, one play, one ex clamation. It is one inning — 8 minutes 45 seconds of description and tension, and a call so literate that sportscaster Bob Costas once said he read the transcript and thought it was a written account, composed after the fact.
BILL SHAIKIN Sandy Koufax got a package in the mail one day, many years ago. A boy had recorded Scully’s broadcast of Koufax’s perfect game, and he wanted Koufax to have a copy. The quality was not great. The first inning was missing. The kid had taped the game in his bedroom, after his father had turned out the lights and told him to go to sleep.
“I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the“Heworld.”isone out away from the promised land.”Asthe lone voice on the air, Scully was his own analyst, every bit as perceptive as he was descriptive. This was how he called the first ball Koufax threw to the final batter: “Very high, and he lost his hat. He really forced that one. That’s only the second time tonight where I have had the feeling that Sandy threw instead of pitched, trying to get that little extra, and that time he tried so hard his hat fell off — he took an extremely long stride to the plate — and [catcher Jeff] Torborg had to go up to get it.”
No other broadcast — no other broadcaster — has captured emotions and put them into words so brilliantly, and so seamlessly within the context of calling every pitch.
‘There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies’
With two outs and two strikes, Scully recited the time: 9:46 p.m. It was the third time in the inning he included the time in his call. The Koufax no-hitter had become an annual event, and Scully always included the date so Koufax would remember it when he played the tape decades later. For the perfect game, Scully called out the time as well, an element that Hall of Fame broadcaster Dick Enberg calls “genius.”
THE CALLS • 153
“The next day people went crazy,” Scully said. “They thought putting the time on it
“There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.”
“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,” Scully said at the start of the ninth inning. “But tonight, September the ninth, 1965, he made the toughest walk of his career, I’m sure, because through eight innings he has pitched a perfect game.”
“He probably did it under the covers when his father didn’t know,” Koufax said. That is the only recording Koufax has of his perfect game — the last eight innings, at Heleast.has a crystal-clear copy of the ninth inning. The Dodgers sold the record — as in, play it on a phonograph — in the stadium. Danny Goodman, the Dodgers’ flamboyant concessionaire, put his name on the label in bigger letters than the ones used for the pitcher or broadcaster: “Last Inning Sandy Koufax Perfect Game. Actual Reproduction as narrated by Vince Scully.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS THE CALLS
Scully sounds almost mournful as he talks about those descriptions today. On radio, he used those verbs and adjectives to paint the picture for the listener. “Far more enchant ing,” he said. On television, you can see for yourself.TheChicago Cubs got no hits that night. In the ninth inning, Scully would deliver a career’s worth of hits.
“You can almost taste the pressure now,” Scully said on the air. “Koufax lifted his cap, ran his fingers through his black hair, then pulled the cap back down, fussing at the bill.”
OPPOSITE: Back in the day, publicists loved to sell a picture with a set-up shot that would try and make things memorable. But Sandy Koufax’s fourth no-hitter, and a perfect game, needed no extra sales job. It was a perfect game for Koufax buoyed by a perfect call by Vin Scully.
