RIP Vin Scully

Scully didn't just call baseball games. He brought a city together.

Aug 03, 2022

It’s hard to explain just how much Vin Scully meant to Los Angeles and to baseball. Without Scully, the Dodgers wouldn’t be the same team that they are, and Los Angeles wouldn’t be the same city that it is.

Baseball was new in California when the team moved from Brooklyn to the Old Memorial Coliseum in 1958. Vin was only 30. The team was lousy that first year, finishing 12 games below .500, and many of the fans only knew the game’s biggest stars. They’d file into the Coliseum, 70,000 of them, with transistor radios so that they could listen to Vinny explain the action to them. All across LA, they listened. During one 1960 game, he asked on the radio that on the count of three, everyone in the stadium yell “Happy Birthday, Frank!” to the umpire. Sure enough, when Vin said, “three,” the whole stadium roared in unison. That’s how tuned in they were to Vinny.

Said one Sports Illustrated report just six years after the team’s move, “Scully has become as much a part of the Los Angeles scene as the freeways and the smog.”

Vin called games, but he also told stories. They came in the middle of innings, in those lulls that some people claim make baseball boring. Vin brought the sport alive during those moments. He’d start by saying, “Now…”: “Now, Jonny Gomes has lived a hard life…” “Now, the Marlins used to be a AAA team…” “Now, let’s go back to Ted Williams, Cleveland, Lou Boudreau…”

You would be at restaurants in Los Angeles, and the TV would be on, volume low. Vin would start launching into one of his stories, and when he did, when he started with that “Now…”, the whole atmosphere in the city changed. You could feel it. Everyone at the restaurant would get quiet, lean forward, listen in…and then the inning would end, and everyone would carry on like they had just gotten a phone call from a beloved uncle. It sounds fake—but I saw it happen night after night.

During moments like that, it was hard not to think that sports are about community, and Vin was its great preacher. He had started as a missionary, bringing America’s pastime to a new coast. He spread the joy of baseball from Beverly Hills to Boyle Heights, from Inglewood to West Hollywood. Vin connected those communities and connected generations within those communities. When he spoke, he gave everyone in the city a voice.

His work itself is hard to fathom in its immensity and impact. According to one calculation, Vin called 4 percent of all MLB games ever. He was in the booth for every Dodger great from Jackie Robinson to Fernando Valenzuela to Clayton Kershaw. He called Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, Don Larsen’s World Series perfect game, and Kirk Gibson’s walk-off. He even announced Joe Montana and Dwight Clark’s “The Catch.” But no call of Vin’s is quite as special as the final inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game.

He was only broadcasting on the radio, and you can listen to the audio here. But reading the transcript gives you a special understanding of just how staggering Vin’s talent really was. At the time, Koufax was only the eighth pitcher in baseball history to throw a perfect game. Vin called two other perfect games in his career, along with 21 no-hitters, but that September night when Koufax took the mound against the Cubs, was the best of all. He could have spent months fine-tuning his remarks, and he still couldn’t have improved on what he did in the moment. There’s not a word out of place. It reads like literature.

Here’s the final out:

One and 1 to Harvey Kuenn. Now he’s ready: fastball, high, ball 2. You can’t blame a man for pushing just a little bit now. Sandy backs off, mops his forehead, runs his left index finger along his forehead, dries it off on his left pants leg. All the while Kuenn just waiting. Now Sandy looks in. Into his windup and the 2-1 pitch to Kuenn: swung on and missed, strike 2!
It is 9:46 p.m.
Two and 2 to Harvey Kuenn, one strike away. Sandy into his windup, here’s the pitch:
Swung on and missed, a perfect game!
(38 seconds of cheering.)
On the scoreboard in right field it is 9:46 p.m. in the City of the Angels, Los Angeles, California. And a crowd of 29,139 just sitting in to see the only pitcher in baseball history to hurl four no-hit, no-run games. He has done it four straight years, and now he caps it: On his fourth no-hitter he made it a perfect game. And Sandy Koufax, whose name will always remind you of strikeouts, did it with a flurry. He struck out the last six consecutive batters. So when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record books, that “K” stands out even more than the O-U-F-A-X.

Rest in peace.

RIP Vin Scully

Scully didn't just call baseball games. He brought a city together.

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