The Press Box - Ep. 142: 'The Press Box': Vin Scully

Episode Date: July 5, 2016

Bryan Curtis examines what makes Dodgers play-by-play announcer Vin Scully undeniably the greatest sports broadcaster of all time. MLB Audio of Vin Scully is used with permission of MLB Advanced Media, L.P. All Rights Reserved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Brian Curtis and this is the press box. Over at the Ringer, we're doing a series called The Undeniable. The Undeniable are the handful of people in the world that everybody loves. Serena Williams, for example, or Dolly Parton. Well, here's my nomination. Eighty-eight-year-old Vin Scully, who's been calling Dodger baseball games on radio and TV since 1950. You want to know why Scully is undeniable? Just listen to this. There's just one problem with enshrining Scully. Ever since he announced that this would be his 67th and final year in the booth,

Scully's been enshrined pretty much non-stop. A few months back, I watched the dedication of Vin-Skully Avenue, and I see people on Twitter saying, Vin-Skulli is the soundtrack of summer, and I'm pretty sure some of these people never even lived in L.L. L.A. It's as if Vinn is so beloved, so undeniable, that we forget to say how it is he came to be great. So here's my proposal. First, forget Venn Scully of L.A. The grandfatherly voice of the Dodgers. Focus instead on Vinny from Brooklyn, the guy who was hired at the

absurd age of 22 years old to call Dodger games at Ebbets Field, the guy who put a soundtrack on the exploits of Duke Snyder and Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson. See, back in the 50s, there were three baseball teams in New York. And Vinnie's voice provided not only a play-by-play call, but a kind of ambient noise. You could hear it on beaches and coming out of living room windows as you walked around. Scully spoke for a burrow as much as he did a baseball team. And don't worry, you don't have to take it from me. I recruited three kids who grew up in 50s, New York, to explain Vinny from Brooklyn.

That voice you hear is Al Michaels, who now calls Sunday night football on NBC. Here's another Brooklyn kid. His name is Marv Albert. Marf had it even better than Al. In 1957, he was embedded with the Dodgers as a summer intern. Away from Ebbets Field, the team's offices were in a 10-story building on Montague Street downtown. On the roof was a hand-operated scoreboard so that the whole borough could see how the Dodgers were doing. And one of Marve's duties as an intern was scurrying up to that roof where he'd listened to Scully's call on the radio and changed the numbers on the score. board as the runs cross the plate. Marve also got to study the master up close. Part of the job for every game, which was incredible. And I would bring my tape recorder. I usually bring either one of my brothers or do the play by point. The point that some of Walter O'Malley's friends. Think about that. On one side of the press box wall, Vince Scully is calling a Dodgers game. And on the other side, 16-year-old Marv Albert is delivering a pretend call into a tape recorder, at least until the Dodgers owner shoes him away.

After the games, Scully would clear out of his booth and Marv would come in. He found papers scattered all over the floor. These were the ads for cigarettes or beer or razor blades that Scully had read on the air. I would, and I would use them on my own fictitious radio station. Over on Long Island lived another kid, Charlie Steiner. You'll know him from SportsCenter. Charlie wasn't from Brooklyn, but that was okay, because by the 50s, Venn's voice carried beyond the five boroughs,

thanks to the Dodgers Radio and TV network. Charlie used to listen in the kitchen at his childhood home. The first time I heard Vin, I was seven years old, and I was like the RCA Victor Dog. My ear was just leaning against the radio, and there was the sound of the crowd, the crack of the bat, the call strike of the umpire,

peanuts, popcorn, cracker jack, and above all of that was this umbrella of a voice, Vin. Before Vin Scully was a member of the Dodgers announced team, the most famous of the Dodgers announcers was Red Barber, or the old Redhead, as he was called, a Mississippi native who favored southern fried catchphrases like, well, I'll be a suck egg mule. Red got the idea of taking on an apprentice. He once said, I've always had the idea in the back of my mind that it would be interesting to take a promising young man and train him. In 1950, the man he found was 22-year-old Scully, who is fresh out of Fordham University. Scully, as the author Roger Conn noted,

had a long-chinned, rather handsome face under a shock of red hair. His tryout was calling a college football game at Fenway Park for CBS Radio. Scully was able to call the game even though Fenway denied him a seat in the press box, and he had to work on the roof. Here's Al Michaels. Indeed, Red and Vinny were master and apprentice. Red was 19 years older, about the age difference between Al Michaels and his new colleague Mike Tariko to give an example. During their four years together, Red and Vin had exactly one fight. Red forbade any announcer from drinking before a game. One day he caught Scully nursing a beer. And Scully protested, that's not a drink. That's a beverage. Red's first lesson to Vin was to be objective.

Baseball announcers could be awful homers. But early on, Red had been told by a Dodgers official, if you have to rip the club, rip it. And so Red and later Vin, did. Young Marv Albert noticed this. Objectivity, and I thought, you know, Vin was extremely, you know... Red would tell Vin, don't pal around with the players after games. Vin made certain exceptions. He helped Duke Snyder pick out reading material on the road. But Scully became what we might call an enlightened homer, which is to say he took great pleasure in Dodgers wins and even rooted for them,

but didn't lose his head in the process. When the Dodgers finally won their first World Series in 1955, Scully merely said, Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are champions of the world. Of course, as he explained to Kurt Smith, author of the Scully biography, pull up a chair,

he couldn't have said anything else because he would have cried. Another Barbara lesson was about the value of shutting the hell up. Barber would lecture, It's not how much, but what you say, Al Michaels explains.

In 1953, Vin, who was 25, became the youngest announcer ever to call a World Series. Three years later, the Yankees Don Larson was working on a perfect game in the series. And Vin, trying not to be a jinx, didn't even mention this fact on the air. In the top of the ninth, he merely said, let's all take a deep breath as we go to the most dramatic ninth inning in the history of baseball. I'm going to sit back, light up, and hope I don't chew the cigarette to pieces.

See, they had cigarettes in the booth back then. By October of 1953, Barber had left the Dodgers in a salary dispute. He'd soon be announcing the Yankees across town. Connie Desmond, the other man in the Dodgers booth, would leave two years later. So it was Scully, still just 28 years old, who was left to be the voice of Brooklyn. Even back then, Scully's style was hard to describe, as he once told author Kurt Smith, My style is no style. I'm really nothing.

Here's one way to think about it. Red Barber was folksy. Friends, he would say to his audience, sounding like the prequel to Jim Nance. Vin wasn't so much folksy as friendly. He would say, pull up a chair. Let me tell you a story about these marvelous boys playing a marvelous game. And remember, back in the 50s, this wasn't Grandpa Vin. It was a young guy, Uncle Vin.

Like a favorite uncle, Scully is won over the audience with the power of stories. Earlier this season, he offered a short history of the beard. Yes, the beard. When the whiskery Padres catcher Derek Norris stepped into the box. First of all, they say way back to the dawn of humanity. Beards evolve, number one, because ladies like them. And number two, it was the idea of frightening off adversaries and wild animals. There's the one-strike pit slung on in a misstrike two.

In fact, it was so scary. This anecdotal style is almost vanished from modern play-by-play. You might hear traces when Bob Costas does a game on the MLB network. Finally, Vinnie from Brooklyn was precise. He wasn't just blabbering but searching for and finding the right word. Here's former SportsCenter anchor Charlie Steiner. His vocabulary is not of this earth and his ability to put it all together in a smooth sounding sentence is like nobody who has ever done it before and ever do it again.

Precision can take on different forms in play by play. There's verbal precision. Scully once said of the old Dodgers manager Walter Alton. Alston, who just won a challenge with the umpires. Alston is walking away like a Philadelphia lawyer who's just won his case. There's also numerical precision. The early baseball statistician Alan Roth worked for the Dodgers, and in 1954 began sharing the booth with Scully.

A Scully broadcast became numerically sounder than most. By September of 1957, it became clear the Dodgers were going to leave Brooklyn. Scully had mixed feelings about the move. According to Kurt Smith, he was relieved. Leaveed when Walter O'Malley told him he had a job waiting in L.A. Scully later ventured an un-PC metaphor to describe his predicament. It's like a man who gets transferred to a job across the country, Scully said, and his wife moves along with him. Scully, in this case, was the wife.

And as he put it, she might not want to go, but she goes. In 1958, the same year the Dodgers started playing in L.A., 14-year-old Al Michaels and his family moved across the country, too. Al graduated high school in L.A., then went to Arizona State to study broadcasting, and then he set off to become a play-by-play man himself. Marve Albert, the former Dodgers summer intern, stayed behind in New York, and though he called his first New York Knicks game at 21, when I asked him if he ever managed to tell Scully he wanted to be a play-by-play man just like him, Marv said,

These days, if you walk into the press box at Dodgers Stadium and walk past Scully's TV booth, you'll find Charlie Steiner, the same kid who listened to Vin in his Long Island kitchen. After calling New York Jets play-by-play in the 80s and doing a decade plus on SportsCenter, he's now one of the Dodgers' Radio Play-by-Playman. I asked Steiner if, even as a young broadcaster, he ever attempted a Scully impression. No, no, no, no, no, no. Even then I wouldn't try it. You can't be anybody else other than yourself. Nobody else going to be Sinatra. So why try to sing like Sinatra? It's pointless. Was it evuncular? Yes. Was it sweet and soothing? Yes. But at the end of the day, it was the first voice I ever heard. And I have followed him to freedom ever since. What we have now, if we're lucky enough to have the right cable package, is Vin Scully of Los Angeles. The guy whose hair is more blonde than red. The guy who spent most of the season being pushed out of the dugout to take yet another curtain call. From that perch, a funny thing happened.

Scully came not only to embody the spirit of L.A. as much as he had Brooklyn, he became Professor Scully to a new generation of play-by-play guys, like Fox's Joe Buck, who was called the Last 16 World Series. In this day and age, everybody tries to sound like the announcer. You know, like, and nobody talks like that. Like, good evening ever a lot. Welcome to the ballpark. Beautiful day here in Chavez, Rulh.

You know, and then you hear him. And it's like this, it just drips with baseball to me. That applied even this year on April 15th when Scully was talking about Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner. You know, Bumgarner tells a story which in a sense reminds you of what it takes to be a big league ball player. Two years ago in spring training. And he and his wife were roping cattle, which is what they do. One one pit. Sinker low, ball two, two and one.

and they were startled by a large snake. In short, the snake had just eaten a rabbit, and Bumgarner hacked the snake to death and save the rabbit, which was miraculously still alive. Sticking that kind of story into a baseball game and making it entertaining is what makes Vince Scully undeniable. Just listen. Think about how tough that rabbit was.

First it gets eaten by a snake, then the snake gets chopped to pieces, then it gets picked up by people and lives. It's all true. Meanwhile, line drive base hit to Santa by Hendrik, and the Dodgers are in business, first and second and nobody out. So I guess really the morale to the whole story

about the rabbit and the snake, you've got to somehow survive, you've got to somehow battle back. A lesson well taught for all of us. That's the press box. If you're scoring at home, my producers are Joe Fuentes and Tate Frazier, who were assisted by Isabella Colcarney.

We had production help this week from Jim Cunningham. Kurt Smith's book Pull Up a Chair was a terrific resource, as was Red Barber's memoir, Rubarb in the Cadbird seat. And I got good at bats off the bench from Zach Cram, Chris Almeida, and Carl Brooks, Jr. There are more of these Press Box podcasts on the way. Until then, I'm Brian Curtis. So long.