Southern California lost its voice Tuesday.
Vin Scully was more than just a baseball announcer. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1958, migrating from Brooklyn with the rest of the Dodgers, and he was here because Walter O’Malley resisted the suggestions from the locals to hire an L.A. guy to do the games.
And not only did he become part of our community and part of our culture, but he became synonymous with it. That voice, wishing us a very pleasant good evening, wherever we might be, provided us companionship as well as information.
He became, indeed, a friend to millions of residents of Southern California who had never met him. Those who did, more often than not, were touched by the modesty and humility he displayed, a reminder that the truly great ones don’t need to advertise it.
And so it was when the news broke Tuesday night, that Vin had passed away Tuesday at the age of 94, no one wanted to believe it was true.
“We have lost an icon,” Dodger president Stan Kasten said in a statement disseminated by the club Tuesday night. “Vin Scully was one of the greatest voices in all of sports. He was a giant of a man, not only as a broadcaster, but as a humanitarian. He loved people. He loved life. He loved baseball and the Dodgers. And he loved his family. His voice will always be heard and etched in all of our minds forever.”
So true.
His was an unmistakable voice. He taught us the game, and he led us to buy transistor radios to listen to the radio call when we attended games – first at the Coliseum, where the seats at the top of the bowl were so remote that the players resembled ants in white and gray uniforms, but also after the team had moved to Dodger Stadium in 1962.
“The people needed the radio,” he told me years ago. “They didn’t need me. They needed whoever was on, and I never forgot that. But the (transistor) radio was the biggest help for us, to make us closer to the fans because they were all listening. And it made you bear down, because if you made a mistake, they were all looking at it.”
Vin always maintained it was the message, not the messenger. But consider: While he was still doing seven innings a night on radio, you could sit anywhere in Dodger Stadium and hear those mellifluous tones. When Vin became the main TV voice and his call was simulcast for a couple of innings on radio, there were fewer portable radios in the stands. And since his retirement after the 2016 season, there are hardly any.
Vin would tell the story of how he first became interested in baseball, right down to the date: Oct. 2, 1936, as an 8-year-old redheaded boy walking home from school in New York, seeing the score of a World Series game – YANKEES 18, GIANTS 4 – posted in the window of a laundry, and becoming a Giants fan because he felt sorry for them.
Yes, he paid it forward. There are multiple generations of boys and girls in Southern California who, 7 and 8 and older, fell in love with baseball via the sound of Vin Scully’s voice. You’re reading one of them. The year I turned 8, the Dodgers were in a race for the pennant, and Scully and partner Jerry Doggett became constant summer companions, thanks to a transistor radio that, if I remember correctly, was a birthday gift.
That love of baseball was an even greater gift. It has continued to this day, and I’m sure mine is not the only example.
Vin’s voice would become the soundtrack of a Southern California summer, be it on the car radio on the commute home when the Dodgers were playing in the East, during a backyard barbeque or pool party, or on one of those transistor radios tucked under the pillow after what was supposed to be bedtime. (All these years later, I’m not admitting anything.)
The best thing? I grew up to become a baseball writer and then a columnist and to share a press box with Scully, who ultimately would have that press box named after him. And I can personally vouch for his graciousness, kindness and humility.
When he referred to us listeners as “friends,” it was more true than even he would ever know. Vin was a family friend, and his family was anyone who followed the game, even if they weren’t Dodger fans.
And there was this, as well: Red Barber, his mentor, stressed above all that Vin should report, not root. Once, the young Scully – that’s what Red called him, in fact, “Young Scully” – said that Willie Mays was the best player he’d ever seen. Barber suggested to him that, well, maybe he hadn’t been around long enough to make such a definitive statement.
Vin remembered all of those lessons. He realized those nightly broadcasts were advertising for the team he worked for, but he also believed his ability to report, and not root, provided a credibility that, sadly, is too often absent with today’s increasingly homerish commentary.
And it’s interesting to note – yup, that’s a Scully-ism – that in his final season of broadcasts, 2016, a season in which not only visiting broadcasters but players and managers would visit his booth to pay homage, before each game the umpires would look up at the booth and wave. Maybe they appreciated that Vin wouldn’t second-guess their every move.
Let us not forget Vin’s versatility, either. He worked NFL games for CBS with John Madden and Hank Stram. The famous Joe Montana-to-Dwight Clark NFC title game touchdown at the beginnings of the San Francisco 49ers’ dynasty in January of 1982? Vin’s call.
He did golf for NBC. During the ’60s he’d do a daytime talk show, and even a game show for a while, “It Takes Two.” He became NBC’s lead baseball announcer in the 1980s, in addition to his Dodgers duties. Kirk Gibson’s home run in 1988? Vin’s call.
There’s often a thread that runs through life. Vin said Willie Mays was the best player he’d ever seen as a young announcer. Decades later, when he’d seen enough baseball that he could credibly make that call, he still insisted Mays was the best.
The day that Scully called his final game – Oct. 2, 2016, 80 years to the day after seeing that World Series score displayed in that window in New York – Willie Mays joined him in the visitors’ broadcast booth at what is now known as Oracle Park, and the plaque commemorating that moment remains in that booth.
And Tuesday night, when the world learned of his passing, the Dodgers were playing in that ballpark.
Rest in peace, Vin. All of Southern California mourns.
jalexander@scng.com
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