The most beloved voice in American broadcast died Tuesday, August 2. Vin Scully was the radio voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and then moved with the team to Los Angeles in 1957, broadcasting on both radio and television. His tenure began in 1950 and ended in 2016, when he was 88 years old. It is by far the longest in sports history.
Of course, this career gave him a front row seat to the racial integration of baseball. You can listen to his call of the final three outs of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game on September 9, 1965. The mound, “the loneliest place in the world.”
There is his call of Kurt Gibson’s famous home run off Dennis Eckersly in 1988: “In a year that has been so improbable . . . the impossible has happened!”
Scully also routinely was brought in to call playoff and World Series games that did not involve the Dodgers. See his call of Mookie Wilson’s hit past Bill Buckner in the 1986 World Series: “Little roller up along first. Behind the bag! It gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!”
