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 wouldn’t last forever. It just seemed like it could. Even in retirement, years after its last broadcast in 2016, its presence remains both omnipresent and ethereal, like the ocean and the air.
“There are two words to describe Vin: Babe Ruth,” said Charlie Steiner, the Dodgers’ radio personality since 2005, after moving west from the Yankees’ bullpen (2002-04). “The best that ever did it. Babe Ruth will always be defined by baseball. Vin will always be remembered as the voice of baseball.”
The wild ride that was Tuesday’s major league trade deadline suddenly and sharply gave way to gravity in the silence of the night the Dodgers announced Scully had died at 94. The cycle of baseball’s life, distilled into a single day: new beginnings and sad endings. Scully’s health had been declining in recent months, and those who knew him well were preparing for the phone call. But when it came, it was still a gut punch.
“It doesn’t make it any easier because we lost a friend,” said Rick Monday, a former outfielder and longtime Dodgers broadcaster. “Whether we actually 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’ve probably seen my byline,” 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 recently. “It says ‘Special Correspondent of The Times.’ I 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 news media were waiting for the press elevator to go home for the evening when Scully joined them for the ride down. He wore a brace on his left hand and wrist, the result of a bout of tendinitis.
“I was telling someone earlier that I should just tell people that I’ve become interested in falconry and I’m waiting for the bird,” he said, smiling broadly. “That would make a better story, wouldn’t it?”
His instincts were perfect and his zest for life constant.
“He was so well-read,” Monday said. “He was also fluent in English. When you listened to Vin, you felt like you had to go back to school right away. But he never spoke to anyone, ever. He was amazing.
In what was one of his last public acts, Scully wrote a letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Epoch Committee to support Hodges’ candidacy for the Hall of Fame, a letter that was considered highly influential. But the ever-humble Scully refused to believe he had enough clout to sway the voters, and he wanted no credit besides.
“Even when I wrote it, I was crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t go public to the point that I would suddenly try to step into the limelight, because I didn’t want that at all,” Scully said this summer. “Yes, I wrote the letter and it was true to the best of my knowledge in all respects. But I don’t want to dwell on that at all.
“I’m extremely 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 his warm invitation at the beginning of each show to “pull up a chair.” And for nearly seven decades, from mansions in Bel Air to 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. Whenever they were in the car when the Dodgers played, Monday recalls, Scully was was their companion.
“His voice was like a gentle hand on our shoulder saying, ‘Hey, things are going to be okay.’ Whatever’s going on in the world, whatever’s going on in your life, for the next three hours, I’ve got you,” Monday said. “That’s the feeling we had.”
Millions of others have experienced similar emotions during these 67 years of Iron Man style.
“I was mesmerized by this game and even more mesmerized by Vin’s voice and the way he presented the game,” Monday said. “His description of the uniforms, the field, how fast a man ran, how hard the ball was hit, the dive made. When Vin made a game, it wasn’t just the games of the game, it was the show of the game.
Monday was the No. 1 pick in the first major league 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,” Ponedelnik said. “This is my seventh year in the majors and my mom heard Vin Scully mention my name. I said, “Mom, you didn’t even know 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 person in Los Angeles. Eight years earlier, the late legendary Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray argued that Scully was the greatest Dodger of them all. 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 produced,” Murray wrote in a column published in August 1990. “It’s true that he didn’t limp to home plate and hit a home run that turned a season into a miracle — but he knew what to do with it so that it would reverberate through the ages.”
When Kirk Gibson smashed that home run off Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley to set the tone for the Dodgers’ upset of Oakland in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, Scully exclaimed, “In a year that was so incredible, the impossible happened!”
For one minute and eight seconds, he remained speechless, allowing the roaring crowd at Dodger Stadium to fill the television speakers. The echo continues to this day.
His sense of timing, story and moment was impeccable, whatever the occasion.
“He wasn’t just a speaker,” Steiner said. “He wasn’t just a baseball figure. He was a father figure, he was benevolent, he was a conscience, he was everything that we would hope was right for the world. And more times than not he was.
Steiner continued, “Los Angeles is a city of stars. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, whatever. I’ve long thought that Vin was the biggest star of all because of his longevity. No one did it better and no one ever said it stinks. He was comforting, parental, angelic. He had a brilliant, untainted mind.
After Tuesday night’s Dodgers-Giants game, Monday said he was in his San Francisco hotel room until 5 a.m., going over the memories in his mind, alternately smiling and crying. When he and his wife travel somewhere, he said, his wife often jokes that the place isn’t as good as it looks in the brochure. “Vin Scully was better than the brochure,” Monday said.
He recalled Scully’s last broadcast at Dodger Stadium in 2016, when the icon beautifully serenaded the sold-out crowd by singing “Wind Beneath My Wings” as the game ended. Pitcher Charlie Culberson had hit a storybook home run a few minutes earlier. What’s easy to forget is that it wasn’t Scully’s last at-bat, the Dodgers ending the season with a three-game sweep in San Francisco.
There, Culberson carried the now-famous bat with him. When he wasn’t sure what to do with it, Monday suggested he get Scully to sign it. Culberson was shy, Monday asked, and Scully said he would be “honored” to sign it.
Monday accompanied Culberson to the press in San Francisco, where they met with Scully.
“It was amazing,” Monday said. “It was like two kids in a park looking at this magic wand of a bat. Vinnie signed it and they were about to say goodbye when who walked into the booth but the man Vinnie always said was the greatest player he had ever seen – Willie Mays.
“Charlie and Vinny were already in tears, then Willie came in and it was like one of those time capsule moments.
“And then we get word in the third or fourth inning here last night, 60 feet from where it happened.”
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