Book Excerpt: Perfect Eloquence: An Appreciation of Vin Scully

Plus ICYMI, Media Savvy and Baseball Photos of the Week.

Apr 29, 2024

It’s been eight years since the great Vin Scully walked away from the mic at Dodger Stadium, and two years since he passed. I think about him often and throughout the baseball season; when there is a no-hitter in progress, whenever the ball is struck just so that “it sounded like he hit with the morning paper” and countless other times. I imagine you do, too. And I miss him. I know you do, too.

Now there is an entire volume of thoughts about Mr. Scully, from scores of people who knew him. With number 26 in our book excerpt series, I am happy to recommend “Perfect Eloquence: An Appreciation of Vin Scully,” by Tom Hoffarth (University of Nebraska Press, May 1, 2024, Hardcover $29.40).

Mr. Hoffarth’s work is organized into sections, referred to as innings, with the sentiments of several contributors in each section. Rather than excerpt a particular chapter as is my custom in this series, I’ve chosen the words of three fine play-by-play men, who, if you’ll indulge me, I shall call his peers. Please scroll.

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Bob Costas, Hall of Fame network broadcaster.

As a Christmas present when I was fifteen, I received a box set of three books called the Fireside Books of Baseball. It was a wonderful and eclectic collection of literature, newspaper and magazine pieces, poetry, comedy, lyrics, first-person recollections of long-ago people and events, all connected to baseball.

Included was a transcript of Vin Scully’s radio call of the full ninth inning of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in September of 1965. At first, the fact it was a transcript escaped me. As I read it, I honestly thought it was a very well-written piece, designed to evoke the moment-by-moment atmosphere and to build tension and excitement as Koufax approached and then achieved perfection. If that had been the case, it would have been worthy of praise.

But no. It was a word-for-word transcript of the live broadcast. In the moment, extemporaneously, Scully composed a masterpiece in the booth equal to Koufax’s on the mound: a perfect game somehow elevated by a beyond-perfect description. That ninth inning is one of the best-remembered examples of Scully’s unique brilliance. It’s all on display: the pleasing and distinctive voice, the command of language and phrasing, the grace notes, the eye for the telling detail, the sense of the moment, and the ability to capture and enhance it without ever resorting to shouting.

Which brings us to this: To truly appreciate Scully’s mastery, it’s not enough to replay standard highlights. Other great broadcasters have also risen to big moments in memorable fashion—the climactic home run, the great catch, the last out of a World Series. What set Scully apart was the framing of those moments—the buildup, the payoff, and then the postscript.

Listen to that entire Koufax ninth inning, to the entire extended at bat that culminates in Kirk Gibson’s impossibly theatrical pinch-hit homer in the 1988 World Series, and then the coda: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”

Or listen to the call of Henry Aaron’s 715th home run, the one that took him past Babe Ruth to the top of the all-time list. The call is exciting and precise, but the aftermath is a first draft of history.

Nearly thirty years ago, I interviewed Ray Charles for the NBC news magazine Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric. When the cameras and microphones had been shut off, we continued to converse. At one point, Ray said, “You know who I would really like to meet? Vin Scully. Could you introduce me to him?”

Well, sure I could. But this was Ray Charles. He must have met countless interesting and accomplished people. Why Vin? “Well, I love baseball. And you have to understand, Bob, the pictures mean nothing to me. It’s all the sound. And Vin Scully’s broadcasts are almost musical.”

I called Vin, and we arranged to have the two of them meet and spend time together before a game at Dodger Stadium. Vin came into the booth, and as he walked toward Charles, he said, “Ray, my name is Vin Scully, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.” He might as well have said, “A pleasant good evening to you wherever you may be,” because that’s how it struck Ray. They sat down, and we had a combination baseball and music discussion. Vin had a nice experience. And Ray Charles—and I mean this sincerely—had one of the great experiences of his life.

Given his surpassing talent and approach, Vin Scully would have been unforgettably great with any team at any time. But the circumstances of his career can never be equaled. And those circumstances amplified his greatness.

The big moments Vin described so well resonated in a way comparable moments perhaps no longer do. Vin called sports other than baseball, of course. His golf and football work was—no surprise—excellent.

Still, it was baseball that called forth the full range of his abilities and sensibilities. The game’s rich history, much of which he witnessed, with its gentle rhythms and leisurely pace, all played to Vin’s many strengths.

In the closing seasons of his career, Vin’s broadcasts were simultaneously present and nostalgic—the story of that night’s game and a flashback to every game or time in your life his voice transported you to. In a world of seemingly fewer constants and enduring connections, that was deeply appealing. No matter how things around him changed, Vin was grandfathered in If, somehow, a twenty-two-year-old broadcaster with talent comparable to Scully’s was to materialize today, that broadcaster would surely wind up in the Hall of Fame, would surely be celebrated. But the circumstances that shaped that broadcaster, as a person and a professional, and shaped how sports are presented and received, would never be close to the same. For so many reasons, there will never be another Vin Scully. He wasn’t once in a generation or once in a lifetime. He was once in forever.

Joe Davis, Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster (2016 to present), Fox Sports lead MLB broadcaster (2022 to present:).

Fans expect that stories are part of the baseball broadcast because Vin Scully made it that way from the moment the Dodgers came to Los Angeles. He did it at the highest level; it’s all the fans have ever known.

When I was in the Minor Leagues, I had heard him do games over the years on the MLB app. I could flip those games on after I did my games and was doing all those postgame side duties you have as a Minor League broadcaster.

But during the 2016 season, I started with the Dodgers just doing road games, still living in Michigan. I listened to Vin do every home game. It was a nightly crash course. But I found myself listening as a fan: Man, this is cool hearing these stories.

Loving stories is part of the human condition—we are a storytelling species. Listeners like having players humanized by their stories. I could appreciate, firsthand, why those stories were meaningful for a broadcast with Vin telling them.

I started to incorporate stories into my own broadcast—poorly, but I felt I was getting better all the time. When I listened to my broadcast and critiqued myself—which I still do often to this day—my ears perked up when I heard myself tell a story. It was interesting how I wanted to lock in and listen to the story, even a bad one. And it’s a heck of a lot more interesting than hearing about a guy’s OPS or what positions he has played over the last week.

I have studied storytelling and tried to get better at it, recognizing that fans expect it, that it makes for a better listen, and that I had a lot of work to do. It all goes back to Vin setting that example and making that a standard.

In today’s broadcast, the play-by-play announcer tries to tee up the analyst. Vin, the last of that breed, did it all solo. He had the blank slate of an inning that he could do whatever he wanted. The modern broadcast, and even broadcasts during Vin’s last thirty to fifty years, is a back and forth. All that said, being a storyteller necessitates fitting stories within the confines of a baseball game, within the context of an inning.

Vin was blessed by the baseball gods to have a lot of the innings play along with whatever story he was ready to tell. The inning would follow along with the pace. If he needed an extra beat, he would get another foul ball. And if his story was wrapping up, it seemed like the guy grounded into the double play on cue to end the inning. It was part of his magic.

I view a game through the lens of how many times a team goes through its batting order. The first time through, we tend to establish the headlines for a player. Sometimes, we tell a story, but usually we discuss what he’s doing on a basic level and who he is. During the second time through, we start to dive a little deeper and humanize him more. Whereas later on, the third- and fourth-time through the order, it’s back to the game. (As a series goes on, we follow that structure, but deeper.) When the broadcast booth has two people, we don’t always have the room to tell a story efficiently, and we don’t want to get in the way of the crunch time late in the game.

Some speculate about how the new pitch-clock rule will affect broadcasts. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve wished I had more time in a game between pitches and between hitters. Besides Vin Scully, broadcasters probably haven’t wanted more time. Broadcasters probably are not going to have that perfect thread through an entire inning. The pitch clock has only been positive for me, certainly, and for most broadcasters. The game has a nice pace and rhythm. We feel better about the broadcasts now because of how the action rules.

My first interaction with Vin was the night before the team announced I had the Dodgers’ job; he called me and left a voice mail, welcoming me to the team. My wife got me a stuffed teddy bear wearing a Dodger jersey. It has a speaker inside, so it talks after it is squeezed. My wife took that voice mail recording and put it inside the bear—pretty cool.

For my twenty-ninth birthday in December 2016, my parents gave me a framed photograph of me with Vin Scully, which we took at the end of his last season. On the photo, Scully wrote, “To Joe: My prayers for you to have a great career.”

Had I looked at the job like I was the one replacing Vin Scully, it probably wouldn’t have gone well. From the start, I looked at it like it was a responsibility. That continues to define the job. It’s an ongoing responsibility to be the guy who followed the best ever to do it and a responsibility to broadcast for a fan base that has only ever had the best ever to do it. Any attempt by me to try to mimic Vin would not have been successful. I learned from Vin and to this day carry the responsibility of the guy who followed him. That is our connection. We couldn’t really prepare for the night when we had to tell Dodgers viewers that Vin had passed away. For about a month before that, we only knew Vin wasn’t doing well. We were mindful it could happen at some point. Between the second and third inning on that night, Mike Levy, our producer, told me Vin just passed away. The team would announce it in conjunction with the family after the third inning, so we had maybe one inning to gather our thoughts. My first thought was that being responsible for announcing to Dodgers fans, many who considered him a family member, that Vin had passed away, I would be the first to do any kind of public eulogy. I tried to do justice to who he was a broadcaster and as a person and what he meant to the team and to baseball. I was trying to do it with kind of a smile. Ultimately, my job is to bring joy to people through baseball. As tough as a night that was for people, I still felt I could call the game and tell stories about Vin and make it more a happy remembrance. And, with all that, I was also trying to do him proud by doing the game justice, telling a story but also respecting each pitch—because nobody did that better than him.

Ross Porter, Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster (1977 to 2004).

In 2022 I posted on my Ross Porter Sports Videos YouTube channel an interview I did with Vin Scully several years earlier. It was one of my favorites and one of the best I had ever done. Here is how Vin addressed these subjects:

Faith: “The course of my strength is my faith. It helped me in personal tragedies. The two worst things you can think of are the loss of a wife and a child. The pain never goes away, but while [I was] in despair, God gave me a chance to find a wonderful wife, eighteen grandchildren, plus the fact he’s allowed me to do what I love to do.”

Success: “Success is momentary. One moment you felt you were able to do the job. Next moment, you weren’t. Napoleon’s biggest problem was he never knew when to stop. One success, another success.”

Humility: “Everything I have is a gift from God. I don’t see how ego can get far. I didn’t do anything to deserve the gifts. I’m eternally grateful.”

Laughter and humor: “Laughter is the basic art of my life for sure. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t find things in this world humorous. I really think I’ve been given a very good sense of humor. I have so many shortcomings that I’ve really loved to laugh. I find it very easy to laugh at myself. On the golf course, I don’t get mad if I make a bad shot. Maybe the next one will be much better. One day on a par three, I hit my tee shot out of bounds. The next shot went in the hole. I got a par—big deal. On to the next hole.”

Kindness: “I love people. I enjoy doing the games, but I really enjoy all of the surroundings that go with it. When I walk into the ballpark, I say hello to Marie on the elevator and ask her about her family. I walk into the press room and talk to David, the chef. There is Maria and Martina, the ladies who work in the back. I go out, and all the writers are throwing arrows at each other, laughing and having fun. I go into the booth, and the fellows I work with every day laugh and joke. All of that is as important to me as actually doing the game. It really is. I have been truly blessed with a good relationship, I think, with almost everyone.”

A sports hero: “First, de-emphasize the word sports. The fact he’s a fine athlete gives him a major opportunity to be a real hero. The real hero, to me, is one who truly does something wonderful but doesn’t believe he’s a hero. The soldier in the battlefield who wants to protect his buddy.”

Here are a few more stories about Vin:

• I never saw Vin rude to one person in the twenty-eight years I worked with him.

• The Dodges had Vin listen to two audition tapes when they decided on their third announcer in December of 1976. Vin chose mine.

• Vin and I had the same birthdate—November 29—and always talked to each other on the phone that day. Jerry Doggett was eleven years older than Vin. And Vin was eleven years older than me.

• At Candlestick Park in San Francisco one cold weekend, in the visitors’ broadcast booth, we couldn’t close the window and shivered. Vin went to Spec Richardson, the Giants general manager, and told him. The next time the Dodgers went to Candlestick, that window was repaired.

• Vin’s favorite food was applesauce.

• Vin was once invited to lunch by the state chairman of one of the political parties in California, who told Vin that the party wanted him to be its gubernatorial candidate. Vin told me he could have told the man right then that he was flattered and thanked him but he was not interested. But he wanted to show respect, so he said he would like twenty-four hours to think about the offer. The next day, Vin politely declined. He laughingly said to me, “The chairman didn’t know I was in the other political party.”

• One Sunday at Mass, Vin learned of two teenaged brothers stricken with Batten disease, a fatal disease of the nervous system that typically begins between five and ten years of age. Those affected have mental impairment, seizures, and progressive loss of sight. When Vin was told the facts, he requested the family’s phone number, called the father, and invited the family to a Dodgers game. After the family arrived, Vin took the boys to the Dodgers clubhouse and introduced them to the players. They watched batting practice on the field and came to his press box booth. Dinner and the game followed, and from the back of the TV booth they briefly watched him work. It was more than a one-night experience for the two high-schoolers. Vin visited them at their home and invited the pair to a game five times. The older brother died when he was twenty-four. The younger sibling is still alive at twenty-eight.

After Vin retired in 2016, I called him every two weeks. We could talk fifteen minutes, but very little about baseball—mostly about politics, world affairs, our families, stories we had read or heard. One time, I set up a lunch with a couple of mutual friends and planned it for a restaurant one mile from Vin’s home. I decided to invite him. He said, “I like all those guys, but Ross, the last thing I want to talk about is baseball.”

In the closing months of his life, his daughters made sure he had twenty-four/seven care. The last time I chatted with Vin was exactly one week before he died. He said, “I’m so tired. I don’t go downstairs anymore and look at my computer. Much of the time I stay in bed, reading a book, watching television, or taking a nap.” As we would up our conversation, his last words were the same as they always were: “Give my love to Lin.”

About the author (via Amazon):

Tom Hoffarth is an Associated Press award-winning journalist with more than forty years of experience reporting in Southern California, focusing on sports and the media. He has written for the Southern California News Group, the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood Reporter, Angelus News, National Catholic Reporter, Los Angeles Business Journal, and Sports Business Journal. He is a coauthor (with Tom Kelly) of Tales from the USC Trojans Sideline: A Collection of the Greatest Trojans Stories Ever Told. Ron Rapoport worked as a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for more than twenty years and is the author of Let’s Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, the Life of Ernie Banks and the editor of The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner (Nebraska, 2017).

ICYMI:

Dodgers’ reliever Brusdar Graterol, out since Spring Training with shoulder inflammation, has been shut down from his throwing program.

Former L.A. ace Walker Buehler threw 86 pitches in a shaky fifth rehab start for Oklahoma City at Albuquerque Wednesday. He allowed seven hits, including three doubles and two homers, five runs (three earned) and two walks while striking out five. I watched the whole thing and it wasn’t pretty. The word is Buehler will make another minor league start Tuesday versus Salt Lake at OKC, but it’s not official. And then we’ll see.

Blake Treinen has been knocked around in his rehab we well. In three appearances, the right-hander has allowed five earned runs on seven hits, with no walks and three strikeouts, for a 19.29 ERA and 3.000 WHIP. As with many I things, I say “patience, Grasshopper.”

Former Dodger Dusty Baker has won Baseball Digest’s fourth annual Lifetime Achievement Award, which “recognizes a living individual whose career has been spent in or around Major League Baseball and who has made significant contributions to the game.” Previous winners were Willie Mays in 2021, Vin Scully (2022) and Joe Torre (2023).

Shohei Ohtani has signed a multi-year contract to serve as Technology Ambassador with Rapsaho, the makers of the baseball’s ball tracking equipment.

Throwing Shade:

Media Savvy:

In a fascinating piece at the Los Angeles Times, Steve Henson and Ashley Lee answer the question, “how athletes and entertainers like Shohei Ohtani get financially duped by those they trust.” The pull quote from financial journalist Diana B. Henriques is this: “Only those you trust completely can rip you off completely.”

Another Steve Henson story worth your attention is “Oldest living MLB player turns 100, vividly recalls facing Dodgers in 1953 World Series,” about former Brooklyn Dodger and New York Yankee, Art Schallock.

Also at the LAT is “Risk and reward: This ex-Dodger used to throw 91 mph. Now he throws 97,” about Brock Stewart and penned by Bill Shaikin.

Unsurprisingly, according to their peers, the Dodgers lead the pack in baseball’s front office rankings. By Andy McCullough, Patrick Mooney and Tyler Kepner at the Athletic.

Also at the Athletic is this moving story by Daniel Brown: “Former Dodger Steve Sax sets out to honor the Marine pilot he calls ‘my hero’.

I don’t usually post items without a byline, but since “What MLB pitchers think of baseball's pitching injury rise” at ESPN.com includes the comments of former Dodger left-hander and one-time Tommy John surgery patient, I’ve made an exception.