It was Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, and Kirk Gibson had just hit a pinch hitter, but not a home run. The Los Angeles Dodgers, considered underdogs against the powerhouse Oakland Athletics, rushed home to greet Gibson, who was considered unavailable with injuries to both legs.
In the broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, Vin Scully sat at the microphone. The words he found were perfect—poetic even.
“In a year that has been so incredible, the impossible has happened,” he said.
The call would go down as perhaps the most iconic of his 67 years in the booth. Yet what preceded it was just as telling for Scully, who died Tuesday at age 94: 67 seconds of silence.
“It’s really my trademark,” Scully would later say. “Day after day, week after week. If something happens and the crowd roars, I shut up.”
Of course, he made enough time for conversations as well. As a presenter, Scully’s style was elegant and conversational—even funny (“Statistics are used like a drunkard uses a lamppost,” he once said. “For support, not illumination”). Anyone listening could feel his love for the game and the curiosity that drove him to uncover the stories he would share, slowly but surely, with his audience.
Over the years, he has called some of the greatest moments in baseball history, but his legacy extends far beyond any single achievement or moment. What’s most remarkable about Scully is the way he has appealed to generations of baseball fans, not just in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, but throughout the sport.
Born in the Bronx on November 27, 1927, he grew up a New York Giants fan, occasionally attending games at the Polo Grounds. After spending two years in the Navy, he attended Fordham University, where he played some baseball and began his career in radio calling football, basketball and baseball games for the university’s WFUV station.
Soon after graduating, Scully landed a job at CBS radio covering college football, but it wasn’t long before his focus returned to baseball. In 1950, he joined Red Barber and Connie Desmond on the Brooklyn Dodgers radio and television team. By 1953, he was the lead broadcaster for the Dodgers. That fall, when the Dodgers faced the New York Yankees in the World Series, Scully became the youngest person ever to broadcast a World Series game.
By then, Scully had developed his own way of bringing his audience closer to the game.
“The game is just one long conversation and I expect it and I’ll say things like, ‘You know that?’ or ‘You’re probably wondering why,'” he once explained. “I’m really just talking, not just play by play.”
When the Dodgers moved west in 1958, Scully went with them. Over the following decades, he called thousands of games soon to be forgotten and a select few destined for the history books. Among his more memorable calls: Sandy Koufax’s four no-hitters, Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run, Bill Buckner’s error in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series and Gibson’s famous 1988 home run.
“It might sound corny,” Koufax once said, “but I enjoyed hearing Vin call games more than playing in them.”
In 1982, Scully won the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame for his contributions to the game as a broadcaster. Years later, in 2016, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But even as the accolades piled up and Scully aged into his 80s, he continued to broadcast. The longevity that endeared him to fans impressed fellow veterans like Jerry Howarth. Early in his career, the longtime Blue Jays broadcaster was so impressed with Scully’s sense of fairness that he went out of his way to introduce himself. Howarth immediately found Scully to be unusually friendly, and the two stayed in touch over the years.
Decades later, long after the now-retired Howarth had become a fixture in the Blue Jays bullpen, he could only marvel at Scully’s resilience. As he walked home from the ballpark one night late in the season, a realization dawned on him.
“After my 33rd year, I’m mentally patting myself on the back for another year,” Howarth recalls. “I’m going too, ’33! Vin Scully made double that. He radiates 66 years!”
In 2016, after 67 seasons broadcasting Dodgers baseball, Scully retired at the age of 88. The voice that told the Dodgers story for decades would no longer be on the air every night from spring to fall.
But the next time a broadcaster pauses and lets the sound of the game take over for a moment, you might hear Scully’s echo. As he once said, “The roar of the crowd has always been the sweetest music. It’s intoxicating.”
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