In this special blog post, I want to pay tribute to the greatest baseball play by play announcer during my lifetime, Vin Scully, who passed away yesterday at age 94. According to his obituary in ESPN.com, Scully called Brooklyn and later LA Dodger games for 67 years, starting in the 1950s and moved with the team to Los Angeles in 1958. He called some of the most memorable plays in baseball along the way with the two most notable being Hank Aaron’s 715th home run and Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series Game One walk off homer (I don’t believe what I just saw.) He also called the complete game of Sandy Kofaux perfect game, Mookie Wilson’s single which went through the legs of Bill Buckner, breaking the hearts of all New England in 1986 and to my eternal regret the game-ending touchdown throw by Joe Montana to Dwight Clark in the 1981 NFC Title Game, which ended the Dallas Cowboys 1970s dynasty.
Tim Erblich sent me the following quote from Bob Costas which appeared in an ESPN tribute to Scully from 2016, “”Somewhere around 1994, ’95, I was interviewing Ray Charles for an NBC news magazine and probably spent a couple of hours talking with him. … Then, when we’re done and the cameras had been turned off, he says to me, ‘You know who I would really like to meet?’ And I’m thinking, ‘He’s Ray Charles. He could have met just about anybody he’d wanted to have met throughout the course of his life. Who might it be?’ … ‘Vin Scully.’ And I say, ‘Why?’ And he says, ‘Well, because I love baseball. But you have to understand, to me the picture means nothing. It’s all the sound. And Vin Scully’s broadcasts are almost musical, so I enjoy baseball so much more listening to him.’ … So I set it up with Vin and took Ray to Dodger Stadium. I was sitting across from Ray, and there was an empty seat awaiting Vin’s arrival, and Vin came walking through the door wearing — as I remember — a royal blue jacket, the way he is always turned out for a baseball broadcast. And as he walked toward Charles, he said, ‘Ray, my name is Vin Scully, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.’ He might as well have said, ‘A pleasant good evening to you wherever you may be,’ because that’s how it struck Ray. And then they sat down, and we had a combination baseball and music discussion. Vin had a nice experience. And Ray Charles — and I mean this sincerely — he’s Ray freaking Charles — I believe he had one of the great experiences of his life.””
Scully was more than the Dodgers play by play guy; he was America’s play by play guy. He could make the sights, sounds and statistics of a baseball game sing with color. He put his love of the game into each call so that you could see the beauty of each pitch and each swing of the bat. While there have been many tributes to Scully, the one I want to salute comes from life-long Dodger fan Adam Turteltaub who said “Summers here will be a lot quieter.” Farewell Vin Scully.
Vin Scully Great Calls (from YouTube)
