Vin Scully: Voice of America

Vin Scully started as a radio broadcaster for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950. He moved with the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958. He continued calling Dodgers games until 2016.

Along the way he called other sports too - football, golf, tennis, for CBS. And in 1983 he started calling national baseball telecasts for NBC. It was in that role that perhaps his two most famous calls occurred, during Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, and Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.

Some of you knew all that. But some of you have to be wondering how it is that so much of America is in deep mourning over the passing of a baseball announcer. Some of the details above hint at it, but it can’t be explained away by mere facts.

April 8, 1974, Atlanta, Georgia. The Dodgers were in town.

Al Downing was on the mound.

It was Vin Scully on the call:

Late in the run of Mad Men, therefore late in the 1960s, Don Draper moves to California. This move is imbued with an interesting and often subtle set of arguments about America and California and progress and so forth. I think we can sometimes forget just how jarring it was to most of the country for anywhere west of St. Louis to be, well, a place.

But baseball had already moved. Yeah, the NFL was already there (the Rams moved from Cleveland in 1946), but… the Dodgers and the Giants moving, that was major American history moving West. Yes, the center of gravity had already started shifting. But that was the rupture, even if it took years for it all to be processed.

When the teams moved, so of course did a lot of the actual stars on the field move with them. Up north, by the bay, perhaps the greatest ballplayer of all time settled in to San Francisco. Down south, a young southpaw who had only just started to make a name for himself landed in the City of Angels.

Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax… synonymous with their teams, forever.

But still, the literal voice of the Dodgers, of baseball in California, had a Bronx accent.

From 1958 through 1995, of the 37 World Series played after the Dodgers moved, the Yankees and Dodgers each won 5 of them. The Yankees reemerged in 1996 as the Evil Empire and all that but for that huge span of time, which managed to encompass my first memories of baseball and my parents’ first memories of baseball, the Dodgers were no worse than the second biggest baseball team in the world. Today, even, I would argue they are no worse than the second biggest baseball team in the world.

And the one man presiding over all of this was Vin Scully. Presiding not as lord or emperor, but as narrator. America grew up, went through great turmoil, had its televisions gradually shift over to color, and the voice of that color was Vin Scully. It wasn’t just that California had gone big league in the late ‘50s. It was that California was the big leagues.

Dodger Stadium is the third oldest stadium in baseball. Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are older, of course. But when you see them you imagine all sorts of crazy history from a time before it was even captured on film. Not so Dodger Stadium. A blimp floats above Chavez Ravine today and it is still pure modern America. And the franchise has long been most closely associated with its beloved announcer, a man of impeccable style and graciousness, with an unparalleled gift for making people feel like they were part of something much greater than them.

You see, California - especially Los Angeles - is the culmination of the American Dream. And no single man has ever more successfully made us all feel like part of that Dream than Vin Scully.

October 15, 1998, Los Angeles, California, but also rural Garden Prairie, Illinois. It was a Saturday night.

I was 11.

There is a camping resort just east of Belvidere called Holiday Acres. In the late spring, people take their camper and put it on their lots. They hang out there summer weekends. Then in the fall they move the campers off the lots, to what is kind of like a parking lot for campers.

That weekend, the campers were being moved. And that is how it came to pass that on a Saturday night in October, I was by myself in a displaced camper in rural Garden Prairie, Illinois, watching Game One of the 1988 World Series between the favored Oakland Athletics (what with their star young home run hitters Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire) and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It was the bottom of the ninth. The A’s manager Tony LaRussa inserted their all-world closer Dennis Eckersley. They were winning 4-3.

Mike Scioscia popped out.

Jeff Hamilton struck out looking.

Mike Davis drew a 5 pitch, 2 out walk, bringing up the pitcher’s spot in the lineup.

Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola were on the call for NBC:

I would argue that there are three home runs which are the most famous. There are other candidates, but three stand out.

The first one was Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round The World” in 1951 which won the pennant for the Giants.

The other two are the two above, called by Vin Scully.

Individual memories can be so visceral that all of the surrounding details get filled in, embedded together in the mind. Sometimes though memories are constructed by repetition. They might even be faulty, especially if some of the construction pieces are slightly off.

I have a weird, jumbled picture in my mind of being in that camper, it’s got to have been constructed over time, but Eck and Gibson and Vin have cemented it all in my mind, not perfectly, but maybe better, kind of like if you cement the handle back onto the coffee mug and get it good enough, and it somehow makes you love that mug even more than you did before the handle broke in the first place.

To this day Vin’s voice evokes a feeling I can associate with that time, even though I’m sure that’s not how I thought about it all then. Vin’s voice, so steady, the timing so right, is like… time cement.

October 25, 1986, Queens, New York.

When the Mets went down 3 games to 1 in the 1986 World Series, conventional wisdom was that it was a done deal, the Red Sox were going to win it.

I don’t remember why but I believe, and predicted, that the Mets were going to come back and win the whole thing. To the very best of my memory, I didn’t have any particular love for the Mets, but I think there was something I slightly didn’t like about the Red Sox, and, I think, my prediction was based in some kind of weird defiance bubbling up in a 9 year old about to turn 10, and because of my prediction, I suddenly had a stake in the whole thing.

The Red Sox of course had not won a World Series since 1918. I did not understand how huge all of this truly was.

It was the bottom of the 10th. Red Sox up 5 to 4.

Wally Backman flied out.

Keith Hernandez flied out.

But then pinch hitter Kevin Mitchell singled. And then Ray Knight singled.

Calvin Schiraldi pulled in favor of Bob Stanley.

Mookie Wilson at the plate.

Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola were on the call for NBC:

It gets through Buckner!

Never in the annals of human speech has there ever been a more perfect selection of a preposition than at that moment.

The Mets of course went on to win Game 7, punctuated by Jesse Orosco’s glove flying off and never landing on the ground. My prediction was proven correct. My small stake paid off.

One of the many beautiful things about Vin Scully, though, is that he didn’t have a stake. Even though he was certainly on some level going to pull for the Dodgers, he was there for us. His job was to help us. To help us be a part of something greater, from sea to shining sea.

At age 9, at age 11, we had no concept of reverence for the announcer. And Vin wasn’t doing national telecasts that long after that point. Ironically, it took the advent of the Internet age for the octogenarian local broadcaster to gain his full due. Unlike stars of the game, who might retire before they turn 40 and are therefore four decades in the rear view mirror when they reach old age, Vin was still doing his thing. He was, in his 80s, still holding us together. And across the baseball universe, at least, we all came to recognize it.

There’s so much more. But all this above, this is why so many in America are in mourning this week over the passing of a broadcaster. What other human beings over the last century have so held us together as a people? Walter Cronkite? Dolly Parton? And who, then, in so doing, has not just held us together, but with such a sense of pure childlike wonderment over that understated but such essential human need, that of play? Fred Rogers? Does anyone else come at all close?

The tributes which have poured out from the people who knew him personally, who had occasion to interact with his graciousness, they can speak with more authority to what kind of a person Vin Scully was. But as so many have said, you just felt like you knew him. And that he knew you. And that, well, we all know each other. And that we are happy to know each other, bound by this beautiful, ridiculous, mysterious, infuriating game, which they still call the American Pastime, maybe not so much because it’s how all Americans still pass their time, but because there is no more American way - no more beautiful, ridiculous, mysterious, infuriating way - to pass that time. And this game has given us many voices, many wonderful voices. And above them all, not because he sought it, but because it was his calling, he was the greatest of them all, and we are all the better for having lived through his time.

October 2, 2016, San Francisco, California.

Vin’s farewell to the fans: