Simply The Greatest! Vin Scully, the gentlemanly, yarn-spinning play-by-play man whose mellifluous voice provided the soundtrack to Dodger baseball from Brooklyn to Los Angeles for a jaw-dropping 67 seasons, has died. He was 94.
Scully, a member of the Dodgers organization from 1950 until his retirement following the 2016 regular season, died Tuesday at his home in Hidden Hills, the Dodgers announced.
When he bid farewell to the broadcast booth, he had called nearly half of the games for a franchise that was born in 1890.
Always even-tempered and an easy listen, Scully was credited with turning Los Angeles into a “transistor town” — his broadcasts were pumped throughout the L.A. Coliseum (the team’s first home out west) and then Dodger Stadium and wafted from traffic jams and street-side venues throughout the sprawling city.
“When a game is on the air, the physical presence of his voice is overwhelming,” wrote Robert Creamer for a 1964 Sports Illustrated profile of Scully titled, “The Transistor Kid.”
“His pleasantly nasal baritone comes out of radios on the back counters of orange juice stands, from transistors held by people sitting under trees, in barber shops and bars, and from cars everywhere — parked cars, cars waiting for red lights to turn green, cars passing you at 65 on the freeways, cars edging along next to you in rush-hour traffic jams.”
It was such a shame that because many distributors refused to carry Time Warner Cable’s Dodgers channel in a cost dispute, most TV viewers in L.A. were unable to hear the great Scully at work for several years.
Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, Scully also called MLB games for NBC starting in 1983. (He received a Peabody Award that year.) On the network’s Game of the Week, he was partnered with Joe Garagiola.
Earlier, Scully did The Masters and other golf tournaments as well as tennis and NFL contests for CBS. It was Scully who did the play-by-play on the NFC championship game in January 1982 in which the 49ers’ Joe Montana threw a last-minute touchdown pass to Dwight Clark to stun the Dallas Cowboys.
Through all that, Scully continued to serve as the voice of the Dodgers.
“His timing is impeccable,” Dodgers broadcaster Rick Monday told Sports Illustrated in May 2016. “He’s never in a rush. It’s like the game waits for him. We have a little joke among us. When Vin starts one of his stories, the batter is going to hit three foul balls in a row, and he’ll have plenty of time to get it in. When the rest of us starts one, the next is a ground-ball double play to end the inning.”
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