LA’s poet laureate
I was eight when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, and with a father who was born and raised in Brooklyn, whose firm had season tickets which they renewed year after year, it was foreordained that I’d grow up a Dodger fan.
What was not foreordained was that we’d listen to Dodger broadcasts every evening they played. That was Vin Scully’s doing.
I was too young to fully appreciate Scully when the Dodgers first arrived, but by their second year in town, once I’d reached the ripe age of nine, I already was in awe of his talents. I know this because I still clearly remember one of his 1959 broadcasts, and how he conveyed what any other sportscaster—hell, any other broadcast journalist—wouldn’t have thought an occasion to become a narrative artist. A rapid-fire narrative artist at that.
The occasion was an argument that broke out among Dodger manager Walter Alston, Giants manager Bill Rigney, and whoever the home-plate and third-base umpires were. When Willie Mays was at bat, he bounced a fly ball off either the left-field foul pole or the netting around it at the L.A. Coliseum, the Dodgers’ makeshift home field until the construction of Dodger Stadium had been completed. At question was whether Mays’s long fly was a home run or was still in play, in which case, as Mays had stopped at second, it was a double.
Initially, the umpires couldn’t decide, which sent both Alston and Rigney scurrying onto the field to help frame their deliberations. As each yakked at the umps, Scully began treating the argument almost as a prizefight, noting when the managers broke into shouts, when they propounded learnedly on obscure rules, when they bobbed and when they weaved. Then, the umps ruled it was a homer, which led Alston to brandish his home-court expertise on the vagaries of the netting the Dodgers had erected in left field, at which point Scully began interspersing his own appreciation of the geometric complexities involved while still maintaining his ringside patter.
Then, abruptly, the umps changed their mind and said, yes, the ball had indeed bounced off the netting, not the pole, and thus had been in play and was a double after all. “Alston walks away like a Philadelphia lawyer who’s just won his case,” Scully said, “and now it’s Rigney’s turn to fry. His gray hair glistening under the lights, he slams his fist into his hands, looks up to the heavens as if to appeal to the gods …”
I can still remember the exact words, 63 years later. If anything is proof of Scully’s talents as a broadcaster, it’s that.
Unlike basketball or hockey, baseball is a slow game (it wasn’t as slow then as it is now, alas), and thus lends itself to extensions of the broadcaster’s art. For one thing, it enables a broadcaster to convey the mood of the moment, an art at which Scully was unsurpassed. I remember listening, as it unfolded, to his soon-to-become-famous 1965 broadcast of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax’s fourth no-hitter and his one perfect game. What Scully managed to do, by picking up details of the players’ and even the fans’ behavior, was convey how just how thick the tension was.
The transcript of that ninth-inning broadcast appears in a classic anthology of baseball writing, alongside articles by Ring Lardner, John Updike, Philip Roth, Red Smith, Heywood Broun, and James Thurber. Just reading it re-creates the tension of the moment and makes clear Scully’s ability, as a spoken-word writer, to set a mood. Again, it’s in the depiction of the details. Some excerpts:
[Here, Koufax is in between pitches to the inning’s first batter] You can almost taste the pressure now. Koufax lifted his cap, ran his fingers through his black hair, and pulled the cap back down, fussing at the bill. Krug [the batter] must feel it, too, as he backs out, heaves a sigh, took off his helmet, put it back on, and steps back up to the plate …
The 1-2 pitch on the way: curve ball, tapped foul off to the left of the plate. The Dodgers defensively in this spine-tingling moment: Sandy Koufax and [catcher] Jeff Torborg. The boys who will try to stop anything hit their way: [infielders] Wes Parker, Dick Tracewski, Maury Wills and John Kennedy …
There are 29,000 people in the ballpark, and a million butterflies … Koufax into his windup and the 1-2 pitch: fast ball, fouled back out of play. In the Dodger dugout, Al Ferrara gets up and walks down near the runway, and it begins to get tough to be a teammate and have to watch …
Novelistic, that Scully; cinematic as well—cutting, as Hitchcock would, to details that build the suspense.
Scully was never pretentious, but he could drop in a literary allusion when, and only when, it provided the mot juste. As he did once during one very early-season Dodgers-Giants game when the great Giant pitcher Juan Marichal, near the end of his career, his fastball gone and his curveball not breaking, was on the mound endeavoring, not very successfully, to summon just enough zip to get him through the inning.
“Watching Marichal struggle,” Scully said, “calls to mind the line of the poet: ‘April is the cruelest month, mixing memory with desire.’”
When editor Charles Einstein first ran Scully’s transcript of Koufax’s perfect game in his collection of baseball writings, he was accused, Einstein later wrote, “of having edited the thing with an eye toward improving its grammar. No broadcaster, the letter writers said, could conceivably speak that brilliantly ad lib. The letter writers are right: such presentation is improbable in the extreme. But the truth is that Scully’s account is taken verbatim from the untouched tape recording of his broadcast.”
Which is why Scully’s brilliance had special appeal to his fellow masters of the word. One such master, Groucho Marx, once remarked of Scully, in uncharacteristic seriousness, that “I can’t think of anyone who’s given me more pleasure.”
Scully’s place in the history of sports and sports narration is secure, but his place in the history of Los Angeles isn’t fully appreciated. In the Dodgers’ first years in L.A., when they played in the cavernous Coliseum, where fans could find themselves in seats hundreds of yards from the action, thousands of them routinely brought transistor radios (in those days, an innovation as ubiquitous as the iPhone is in ours) to the games to hear Scully tell them what they were straining to see, adding his own inimitable context. Both at the park and beyond, he was L.A.’s nighttime talker, engaging many more Angelenos than the local talk radio guys ever reached.
Coming when they did, the Dodgers and Scully arrived in what was still a somewhat provincial city. Otis Chandler was still several years away from taking over the L.A. Times and turning it from a hometown boosterish and reliably Republican rag into a serious, sometimes great, newspaper. The theater scene was largely nonexistent; the art scene was innovative but confined to a handful of ateliers; UCLA and USC had not yet become intellectually significant; rock had yet to find its homes on the Sunset Strip and in Laurel Canyon; a committee of green-eyeshade businessmen still ran politics as if the city were a small town. What was new and first-rate and universally accessible was Scully at the mic—an overture of sorts to the breakouts and breakthroughs the city would attain in the ’60s and ’70s in so many disparate arenas. Scully portended a city on the rise.
I was probably fated to become a writer, for which any number of people, beginning with my parents, are to blame. It was Murray Kempton who taught me what a column could do; Michael Harrington who taught me how to think dialectically; Jonathan Swift who showed me how rage can be expressed through humor. But it was Vin Scully, I think, who made me fall in love with words and first showed me how they can summon a scene and spark an evening. Not to saddle the guy with that now that he’s gone and can’t issue disclaimers, but there it is.