“Hi, everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you wherever you may be.” Millions upon millions of Americans heard those words thousands of times, spoken by Vincent Scully, who died today at the age of 94 after calling the Dodgers for 67 years. He called radio and television games in a tone that felt as natural as breathing. Red haired and blue eyed, Scully had a voice that was a national treasure.  

When the Dodgers bailed from Brooklyn in 1958, Scully went with them. The Associated Press reports that Scully reckoned that the birth of the transistor radio was “the greatest single break” of his career, as fans in the cavernous Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum used the device to listen to Scully at games they were attending, Golden Coasters still unfamiliar with the ballplayers from back East.   

Scully is cited as the greatest broadcaster the national pastime has ever seen. None spent longer with one team than Scully did with the Dodgers. He’d begun calling games in the “era of Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson,” the AP noted, continued to “Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax,” persisted “with Steve Garvey and Don Sutton,” and went into 1980s “with Orel Hershiser and Fernando Valenzuela.” He worked into the 21st century.

It was Scully who called Hank Aaron’s besting of Babe Ruth’s home run record. “What a marvelous moment for baseball,” Scully declared. “What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the State of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol.” He let the moment breathe, and then gave it words. 

Of a perfect game by Sandy Koufax, Scully remarked, “So when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record books, that K stands out even more than the O-U-F-A-X.” He said Koufax’s name “will always remind you of strikeouts.” Of Bill Buckner’s cataclysmic error in the 1986 World Series, Scully quipped, “If one picture is worth a thousand words, you have seen about a million words.”  

Scully’s feel for the game was timeless: Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review goes so far as to call his work an iteration of “the genius and zenith of American civilization.” It was also his passion, honed over innumerable summers, night after night, season after season. With Scully silent, there are reasons to worry that America has lost the habit of attending to baseball’s deliberate pleasures.    

According to Fox, this year’s All-Star Game evinced a 10 percent decline from 2021 viewership of the contest, and constituted an all time low for the Midsummer Classic. The 2020 and 2021 World Series were the least watched of the Nielsen ratings era, which began in 1950, when Scully acceded to the microphone. We can’t help but wonder whether this decline has something to do with the great Scully hanging it up. 

Certainly there are no true inheritors of his mantle, as he once took the baton from Red Barber, the molasses inflected voice of an even earlier era. It was Scully who enticed one of our staff, a young Yankees fan raised on Long Island, to stay up late and become acquainted with a particularly mesmerizing voice carried across the continent from Southern California, telling stories of the boys in blue uniforms playing under palm trees and sunny skies.