I wanted to pick up my phone Monday and call Vin Scully.
The Dodgers! The Yankees! The World Series! The stories!
The best broadcaster in baseball history was a historian, delighted to share what he had witnessed over the decades of his decorated career, not as impressed with his accomplishments as he was with the opportunity to illuminate his craft.
In 2017, the year after he retired, Scully told me how he might have called Justin Turner’s walkoff home run in the National League championship series.
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In 2020, amid a pandemic in which games went on without fans and broadcasts included recordings of crowd noise, Scully told me how he and the Dodgers had once faked crowd noise on a 1968 broadcast.
In 2021, when the Dodgers and San Francisco Giants clashed in the division series, Scully told me why he considered the decisive game “the most important game in the history of their rivalry.”
Who would know better? Scully had grown up in New York when both teams played there. The red-headed kid would grab some crackers, and sometimes a glass of milk, and crawl under the four-legged radio in the living room, falling in love with the roar of the crowd.
The Giants were his childhood team. The Dodgers were his professional life.
The Yankees were the third team in town, and the most regal of them all. That song about the three Hall of Fame center fielders in New York: Willie, Mickey and the Duke? Scully called them all.
For all the hype surrounding this coast-to-coast World Series, the glory days of the rivalry took place when the teams played 15 miles from one another: the Dodgers in Brooklyn, the Yankees in the Bronx.
The truest rivalries are born in October and, back then, postseason play meant the World Series. There were no other playoff rounds. There was no interleague play. The league champions simply advanced to the Fall Classic.
The Dodgers and Yankees have clashed in the World Series 11 times: the first time in 1941, the last in 1981. This is the first time Scully will not be here to see the teams play in the World Series, to share their stories with us in the way only a man who went ice skating with Jackie Robinson could.
Scully died two years ago, at 94. I cannot ask him to tell us all about the Dodgers and the Yankees and the World Series.
He already had.
In 2016, the last of his 67 seasons as voice of the Dodgers, I asked him about his favorite call.
I would have picked his stunningly poetic description of the final inning of the Sandy Koufax perfect game: “There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.”
You might have picked his call of the Kirk Gibson home run: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”
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Someone else might have picked his call of the Hank Aaron home run, the one that broke Babe Ruth’s all-time record: “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.”
Scully, ever so diplomatic for so many decades, happily acknowledged his favorite call.
The Dodgers. The Yankees. The World Series.
“I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been present at a lot of great events,” Scully said. “I think, because I was so much younger and more impressionable and vulnerable to emotion, it was when the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only world championship.
“I had felt the frustration. I had known these players all those years. Plus, I was 25 years old.
“There have been Gibson and Aaron and all, down the line. But that’s probably the one I’ll remember the most.”
The year was 1955. At the time, players did not earn stratospheric salaries. They got jobs when baseball was out of season. They lived, year-round, in the communities in which they played.
Scully befriended them. He lived where they did, worked where they did, was as old as they were. And, because he grew up in New York, Scully was painfully aware of the legacy of a club once known as the Brooklyn Bridegrooms. Never had they won the World Series.
The Dodgers had gone to the World Series in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953 — every time against their New York neighbors, the Yankees. The Dodgers lost, every time.
On Oct. 4, 1955, the Dodgers won the World Series. They beat the Yankees.
“For one great big moment, to be able to say — in fact, I said, on the last out — ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.’ And I never said another word,” Scully said.
“And all that winter, people would say, ’How could you have been so calm?’ And the answer was, I wasn’t calm. I could not have said another word without starting to cry. It was that emotional for me, knowing all these players and how they had missed in so many years.”
The Dodgers and Yankees renew their World Series rivalry Friday. We miss Scully all the time, and especially now. Of course, if he had told that story on a broadcast, he would simply smile, nod over his shoulder and say, “Let’s get back to this one.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
