Old Masters

Last night on the MLB Network I watched the San Diego Padres play the Los Angeles Dodgers at Chavez Ravine.  I like baseball, but that's not the reason I watched the game.  It was for the pleasure of listening to Vin Scully's voice.  If you think you don't know Vin Scully's voice, you're wrong.  You know it.

Vin Scully is 84 now and has been announcing Dodger games since 1950 (starting under the tutelage of the  great Red Barber). His voice is a little thicker now and with age he now limits himself to Dodger home games and when they are on the road in California, Arizona or Colorado but he is as sharp as ever when it comes to baseball.  He still works the game alone, as he's done since Barber left the booth in 1953 - which is unique among today's sports broadcasters.  And he still gets excited - last night it was about the Padres rookie pitcher, Andrew Werner, who came out of the Frontier League and was making his third major league start.  Werner threw first pitch strikes to 20 of the first 22 batters and Vin made sure to let us know how well the kid was doing. (Werner went 6 innings and struck out 8; the Dodgers rallied to win 4-3 in 11 innings)

It's wonderful to listen to Scully on the TV but his voice is best appreciated on radio (preferably in a car).  His tone and cadence are immediately recognizable. Always measured and in control, it fits with the pace of baseball.  He knows when to talk and when not to.  Joe Posnanski captured it best in a 2010 profile (can't find the full interview on the internet so no link):

Like water out of a shower head. No announcer in the history of sports has used crowd noise more musically than Scully. Can it be a coincidence? Sinatra used to say that his musical instrument was not his voice, it was the microphone. Scully uses crowd noise as his orchestra. When Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run, Scully was there, and he called the home run, and then he took off his headset, walked to the back of the room, and let people listen to the crowd cheer. Like water out of a shower head. “What could I have said that would have told the story any better?” he asks. And he pauses: “You know what? I still love listening to the sound of a crowd cheering. Don’t you? Don’t you just love that sound?”

Listening to him today takes me back to my childhood - that he is still doing this and I'm now retired is astonishing.

This is one of Scully's best known moments - calling the 9th inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on Sept 9, 1965 - "there's 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies" (this video also includes some added background on the game by Scully in a 1995 interview).