Major League Baseball is losing one of its most-treasured fixtures at the end of this season.
Over the last six decades, many players have been called The Face of Baseball. Today it is Mike Trout, and before that Derek Jeter, and the list runs on back through Cal Ripken Jr. and Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio. But only one person has been The Voice of Baseball for all that time: Vin Scully.
The iconic Dodgers broadcaster — who spent time in all of our homes as the play-by-play announcer for so many “Game of the Week” broadcasts and for so many postseasons — says that this season will be his last. He will be 88 and have broadcast the Dodgers for 67 seasons.
Yes, his voice will live on forever in the backdrop of many of the sports’ most-memorable moments: Kirk Gibson’s home run to end Game 1 of the 1988 World Series and Bill Buckner’s error to finish Game 6 of the 1986 World Series are two that appear almost nightly on television.
But this is the last season to see him make his special brand of magic on a live broadcast.
“I remember when I first got the Major League Baseball package,” long-time Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay said. “I would go home after working a Yankees game and listen to Dodger games. I felt like I was stealing. I just couldn’t believe I was getting to hear Vin Scully.
“Now, I had him on the ‘Game of the Week’ growing up. But to hear him every day and listen as he weaves the story of a game? He’s maybe bigger than any Dodger that ever played.”
If you like baseball or just appreciate a great artist at work, you owe it to yourself to make sure you hear him one more time in a live broadcast this season, whatever it takes.
“Vinny is like no one else. He comes to a game and it’s like a painter arriving at a canvas,” says John Filippelli, who was the producer at NBC for “Game of the Week” broadcasts where Scully performed play-by-play. “He fills in the canvas. It’s Norman Rockwell through a microphone.”
There were great baseball broadcasters before Scully came out of Fordham University and joined Red Barber in the booth at Ebbets Field. There have been greats since, including Bob Costas and Al Michaels to name a couple. However, Scully remains unmatched. It’s not just the dulcet tones of his voice that are so welcoming. It’s the way he can tell you about everything that is happening on the field.
“He may be the first and only baseball poet,” says Filippelli, now the YES Network executive producer.
There are things aside from sound and language to marvel at in Scully, too.
In his capacity as a national broadcaster, he has shared the booth. But primarily in his work on the Dodgers, he is a solo act. That would seem to come from his early roots on the radio. But in this age where a typical television broadcast team has two or three people in the booth and maybe a sideline reporter to boot, his old-school style stands apart.
“That’s much harder. You have to fill all that time yourself. It’s all you. It’s your show,” Kay said. “I don’t think anyone could ever demand that again. I know he couldn’t do it for national broadcasts because of how they are structured, but I’ve spoken with him and he likes to work alone. He likes to weave the stories that make up the game on his own.
“I don’t think there will ever be anyone like him again.”
Though Scully has been a Dodgers broadcaster for his entire career, he has never called a game in a partisan way as so many of today’s play-by-play announcers do. It was a lesson that he learned from Barber and that you still see today. He can tell the opposing team’s stories with the same color.
This was on display in the 1988 World Series. The call on the Gibson home run is ubiquitous. But to hear Scully call the end of Game 3 is illustrative. Oakland’s Mark McGwire ended that contest with a walk-off home run, too, and Scully met the moment with exactly the same big feel as he had on the Gibson blast. Just as he had two games earlier, he did not talk over the moment. And at the end of a home run trot, he summarized the hero’s story. This time it was not the Dodgers’ Mr. Clutch overcoming injury, but young McGwire’s rising place in Oakland and putting the A’s back in the series.
It is the character of his broadcasts — and not just the length of his Hall of Fame career — that set him apart from other long-time play-by-play men.
“There are other broadcasters who have done it for two or three or four decades — like an Ernie Harwell — and they become iconic to their marketplace,” Filippelli says. “Vinny is different. His marketplace is the entire country. It’s not just L.A. He is the whole country’s iconic voice.”
So take a piece of good advice as you travel through this season. Maybe a friend has the MLB Extra Innings package. Or maybe it means taking in a Dodgers game at a sports bar. Or maybe you find a way to stream it in your home. Take another listen to Vin Scully. How often do you get to watch one of the greats perform one last time?