It was Venice Beach, Pink’s hot dog stand, and the Hollywood Bowl all rolled into one. He was Los Angeles, the sound of summer, the poet laureate of the Dodgers—Brooklyn and Los Angeles—for 67 seasons.
We knew Vin Scully wasn’t going to last forever. It just seemed like he could do it. Even in retirement, years after its last broadcast in 2016, its presence remained as ubiquitous as ethereal, like the ocean and the air.
“There are two words to describe Vin: Babe Ruth,” said Charley Steiner, the Dodgers’ play-by-play man since 2005 after moving west from the Yankees’ stand (2002-04). “The best thing that ever did. Babe Ruth will always define baseball. Vin will always be remembered as the voice of baseball.”
The wild ride that was Tuesday’s major league trading deadline gave way suddenly and abruptly to a heavy silence that night, when the Dodgers announced that Scully had died at 94. The Life Cycle of baseball, distilled into one day: new beginnings and sad endings. Scully had been in decline in recent months, and those who knew him well had braced themselves for the phone call. But when it came, it was still a punch.
“It doesn’t make it any easier, because we lost a friend,” said Rick Monday, the former Dodgers outfielder and broadcaster. “Whether we met Vin Scully or not, he was our friend.”
Like the best of friends, he was full of wonder, joy, humility and surprises.
“When I was in college, I wrote for The Times, so you probably saw my name,” Scully said eagerly to begin an interview with The New York Times earlier this summer for a story on Gil Hodges , as if his days at Fordham University were just around the corner. “It says, ‘Special Correspondent of the Times.’ It was under an assumed name. Anyway, I just wanted you to know my literary background.”
Another time, late at night after an interleague game at Angel Stadium early in the 2013 season, some members of the media were waiting for a press elevator to go home for the night when Scully joined them to go down. He wore a brace on his left hand and wrist, the result of an attack of tendinitis.
“I was telling someone earlier that I should tell people that I’ve become interested in falconry and that I’m waiting for the bird,” he said, grinning broadly. “That would make a better story, wouldn’t it?”
His instincts were perfect and his joie de vivre constant.
“He was so well read,” she said Monday. “He also owned the English language. When you heard Vin, you felt like you should go back to school immediately. But he never spoke ill of anyone, ever. It was incredible.”
In what was one of his last public acts, Scully wrote a letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame Era Committee in support of Hodges’ Hall of Fame candidacy, a letter said to he was very influential. But the ever-humble Scully refused to believe he had enough clout to sway voters, and he didn’t want any credit, either.
“Even when I wrote it, I was crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t go public to the point where I’m suddenly trying to put myself in the spotlight because I didn’t want it at all,” Scully said this summer. “Yes, I wrote the letter, and it was true, as far as I know, in every way. But I don’t want to dwell on it at all.
“I’m very sensitive now that I’m retired. I just don’t want to do anything where I might look out of place.”
But Scully’s “place” was everywhere, a friend welcomed by all, starting with her warm invitation at the start of each broadcast to “pull up a chair.” And for nearly seven decades, from the mansions of Bel Air to the blue-collar neighborhoods around the Southland, on behalf of the Dodgers, he created an incredible extended family.
Monday grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., with a single mother who fell in love with the Dodgers when they moved west in 1958. Every time they rode in the car when the Dodgers played, Monday recalls, Scully was his sidekick.
“His voice was like a gentle hand on our shoulder saying, ‘Hey, things are going to be okay.’ Whatever happens in the world, whatever happens in your life, for these next three hours, I get you,” he said Monday. “That’s the feeling we had.”
Millions of others experienced similar emotions during those 67 years of Iron Man.
“I was fascinated by this game and even more by Vin’s voice and the way he presented the game,” he said Monday. “His description of the uniforms, the field, how fast a guy ran, how hard a ball was hit, a diving catch that was made. When Vin made a play, it wasn’t just the plays of the game, but the game show.”
Monday was the first overall draft pick in the first amateur baseball draft in 1965, taken by the Athletics, who traded him to the Chicago Cubs before the 1972 season.
“So the Dodgers finally go to Chicago and my mom gets to watch the game on TV,” he said Monday. “It’s my seventh year in the bigs, and my mom heard Vin Scully mention my name. I said, ‘Mom, you didn’t even realize I was in the big leagues until Vin mentioned my name. “. She laughed. That made it official.”
The Los Angeles Times magazine in 1998 named Scully the most trusted man in Los Angeles. Eight years earlier, the late and legendary Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray argued that Scully was the greatest Dodger of all time. Little has changed since then.
“Vincent Edward Scully meant as much or more to the Dodgers than any .300 hitter they ever signed, any 20-game winner they ever pitched,” Murray wrote in a column published in August 1990. “True, he didn’t limp home and hit the home run that turned a season into a miracle, but he knew what to do with it so it would resonate through the ages.”
When Kirk Gibson smashed that home run off Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley to set the tone for the Dodgers’ showdown in Oakland in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, Scully exclaimed, “In a year that’s been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”
For one minute and eight seconds, he was silent, allowing the roaring crowd at Dodger Stadium to fill the television speakers. The echoes continue to this day.
His sense of timing, story and timing was impeccable, whatever the occasion.
“He wasn’t just an announcer,” Steiner said. “He wasn’t just a baseball figure. He was a father figure, he was avuncular, he was a conscience, he was everything we hope was right with the world. And more often than not, it was.”
Steiner continued, “Los Angeles is a city of stars. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, you name it. I’ve long heard that Vin was the biggest star of all because of his longevity. No one has ever done it better, and no one ever said he stinks. He was comforting, fatherly, angelic. He had a brilliant, flawless mind.”
After Tuesday night’s Dodgers-Giants game, he said Monday he was in his San Francisco hotel room until 5 a.m. going over the memories in his mind, alternately smiling and tearing up. When he and his wife travel somewhere, he said, his wife often jokes that the place wasn’t as good as the brochure. “Vin Scully was better than the brochure,” he said Monday.
He recalled Scully’s last Dodger Stadium broadcast in 2016, when the icon beautifully serenaded the sold-out crowd by singing “Wind Beneath My Wings” as the game ended. Utility man Charlie Culberson had torn apart a storybook moments earlier. What’s easy to forget is that it wasn’t Scully’s last broadcast, the Dodgers ending that season with three games in San Francisco.
There, Culberson had the now-famous bat with him. When he wasn’t sure what to do with it, Monday suggested that Scully sign it. Culberson was coy, he asked Monday, and Scully said he would be “honored” to sign it.
On Monday, he escorted Culberson upstairs to the San Francisco press room where they met with Scully.
“It was amazing,” he said Monday. “It was like two kids in a park examining this magic wand of a bat. Vinny signed it and they were about to say goodbye when who walks into the booth, but the man Vin always said was the best player I’ve ever seen: Willie Mays.
“Charlie and Vinny were already in tears, then Willie walks in and it was like one of those time capsule moments.
“And then we get the news in the third or fourth inning here last night, 60 feet from where this happened.”