And That's the Ball Game

He’s unrecognisable in this 1943 photo, a teenager whose football team at Mt. St. Michael’s High School in the Bronx had yet to be defeated. The day the photo was published, he was about to play in the Polo Grounds. But he became associated with a different sport and a different New York stadium.

The young man is one of the greatest of all baseball announcers, Vin Scully. His voice has been permanently silenced at age 94.

Before he began easing into his career in the broadcast booth with the Brooklyn Dodgers, we find him playing college football at Fordham. And doing something else. The New York Times of Oct. 8, 1947 reported.

A play-by-play description of this Saturday’s football game between Penn State and Fordam University will be carried at 1:45 over Fordham’s frequency modulation system, WFUV. Don Kearney, Vin Scully and Joe Sansone will be at the microphone.

The head of the station’s radio-TV department raved about him to Variety in January 1950:

[T]ake a lad from last year’s June class—“Vin” Scully. Graduation day found him working at WTOP, CBS’s Washington outlet, and in the fall the nation heard him reporting in each Saturday for Red Barber’s football and sports roundup. Now, we hear that Barber has signed him as his assistant for next season to broadcast and telecast the Brooklyn baseball games. Here is one of the Ted Husings of tomorrow.

Husing is forgotten today, one of greats of his time, and with a bit of an outsized personality, perhaps also not uncommon for the early network radio days of the ’30s.

Scully started announcing in a far different time than today. Like his mentor Red Barber, he was a reporter rather than a biased cheerleader. The ball park was a canvas. English was his paint brush, and he deftly and gently used the vernacular to inform millions of people tuned in exactly what they weren’t able to see. In television, he learned which paints not to use because the audience could view the canvas.

He outlined a bit of his philosophy in this January 25, 1957 story in the Daily News..

Season's Close Sends Vin Scully Home to Relax
By ART MULLIGAN
Thanks to the ever-vigilant sports writers, the off-season activities of our Brooklyn baseball heroes are no secret to the public. But what about the baseball announcer? What does he do during these long winter months? Take Vin Scully, the Voice of Brooklyn. He doesn’t do much of anything except what he wants to do.
And that includes reading, relaxing, making an occasional commercial or sports television feature, appearing at banquets or following his latest hobby—photography.
"I really don't have a worry in the world during the off season except maybe catching a cold that might affect my voice," he said yesterday. "I have to be careful about being out in the wrong kind of weather.

"After all that traveling around during the summer months, it's nice to be able to just stay at home and take it easy. I love to read and I devote quite a bit of time to it during the cold season."
Home to Vin, still a bachelor at 29, is in Bogota, N.J., where, he said, he lives with "my father, my mother, my sister, the canary and myself in that order of importance."
Vin doesn't have to train during the off-season for his job, but he still finds that doing some 30 exhibition games, 154 regular season contests and now and then a World Series, if the Dodgers qualify, is a strain.
“During the 1955 World Series, when Podres was turning back the Yankees, I lost seven pounds, " the angular, 164-pound redhead said.
Millions on Mind
Scully explained that part of the tension was caused by the realization that about 75 million persons were listening to his voice. "It wasn't so much the excitement or closeness of the Series," he said.
As for rooting for the Dodgers, Vin is not allowed to show partisanship on the air, and, in fact, claims he does not root so much for the team as for the individual players.
"You get to know these fellows pretty well," he said, "and you find yourself silently rooting for them to get a base hit or make the good play. When Hodges was in that slump of several years ago, I suffered almost as much as he did. The fans did too."
He would much rather work a game than be a mere spectator, Vin said. He found that out last fall when he went to Japan with the Dodgers and "sat out" about 30 games.
"I guess it's just like a ball player on the bench," "You'd much rather be in there doing your bit."
Vin still hasn't got over the wonder of becoming a Brooklyn baseball announcer less than a year after his graduation from Fordham in 1949. He was working for CBS the following winter when Ernie Harwell left Brooklyn to broadcast for the Giants. Vin auditioned for the job, went to Vero Beach in February, 1950, on a tryout basis and that was that.
He did his first sports broadcasting on the Fordham station, WFUV, but mostly football and basketball. He couldn't very well announce baseball he played centerfield for the varsity for three years.

Scully’s world was upended that year. Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley followed the money trail from one coast to another. Scully moved with the ball club to Los Angeles.

But Scully never changed as sports and sports broadcasting did. Leagues expanded. Television expanded. Fans today might have trouble fathoming that if you wanted to see the major leagues on TV, you got a chance once a week—after the cartoons on Saturday morning on NBC’s “Game of the Week.” The money trail got longer with time. A couple of decades later, there was cash for cable TV sports channels, cash by the billions and billions of dollars that made baseball ubiquitous on the home screen. Today, you can tune in several games at the same time—for the right dollars.

As the audience grew, so did the reputations of those in the broadcast booth heard and seen by the audience. Time needed to be filled. Play-by-play and colour announcers interviewed each other and made celebrities of each other. The classy Scully got caught in the wake by his mere presence. He was probably more revered at the time he retired than during those early days of highly partisan baseball in New York City.

Through it all, Vin Scully resisted any temptation to add phoney hype, to agonize over creating a “clever” trademark home-run call, to hyper-analyse meaningless trivia.

Instead, this is what Scully said on the air from Dodger Stadium at 9:46 p.m., September 9, 1965. Sandy Koufax on the mound:

“Two and 2 to Harvey Kuenn, one strike away.
“Sandy into his windup, here’s the pitch.
“Swung on and missed, a perfect game!”

Scully didn't say a word for the next 38 seconds as the sound of the crowd of 29,193 washed over him and his listeners. What else needed to be said?

One of the 29,193 was a little girl. She was a big girl in 2012 as it was nearing time for Scully to step away from the microphone. Here’s part of her story from Palm Springs’ The Desert Sun of February 4th that year. This excerpt gives you insight into Scully and his fans.

Marti Squyres has saved one message on her answering machine at home.
Squyres first remembers hearing the voice on the message in the early 1960s when she was a child searching for it on her small transistor radio. Hiding under her bedcovers so her parents wouldn't think she was awake, she would try to position the radio just right in order to hear it.
Squyres, a costume designer who lives in Woodland Hills, didn't need the man behind the voice to introduce himself on the message she received in 2007, but he did: "Hey, Marti, this is Vin Scully. I'm taking the liberty of calling you to thank you for your kindness and thoughtfulness."
The longtime Los Angeles Dodgers announcer was thanking her for baking him some cookies, which she has done twice every season since then.
Last August, those cookies became famous when she delivered her latest batch -- banana chocolate chip -- to Dodger Stadium with a note reading: "This is a bribe to get you to come back next year." Scully was holding two cookies during the fifth inning of a telecast when he announced he was returning for his 63rd year with the Dodgers.
"God's been awfully good to me, allowing me to do the things that I've always wanted to do," he said. "I asked him for one more year at least. He said, 'OK, and be quiet, and eat your cookie.' I'll do the same thing."

Until the day he retired, he told the audience what was happening, just as he did at Ebbets Field in 1950. In return, the audience gave him admiration and respect.

What else could a broadcaster want?