‘Scully’s Shrine’: A Broadcaster and His Ballpark

Vin Scully served as Dodgers broadcaster from 1950 through 2016. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

 

For 55 of his 67 years as a broadcaster for the Dodgers, Vin Scully went to work at the same place: Dodger Stadium. In 2001 the area from which he broadcast became the Vin Scully Press Box. In 2016, his final season, the Los Angeles City Council changed the name of the street leading to the ballpark from Elysian Park Avenue to Vin Scully Avenue. In 2017, the year after he retired, the Dodgers added his name to the “Ring of Honor” of Hall of Famers with retired numbers, representing him with “Vin” and a “microphone.” Those honors speak to Scully’s history with the team and the ballpark, and how their interconnections remain after his death in 2022.

Several of Scully’s ties to Dodger Stadium, and harbingers of how inseparable they would become, originated before anyone with the team had even heard of Chavez Ravine or built a ballpark there. Scully realized the connection between a ballpark and its team when he grew up going to New York Giants games at the Polo Grounds in the late 1930s and early 1940s: After its destruction in the early 1960s, he saw an oil painting of the Polo Grounds and “felt like I had been kicked in the stomach.”1 He became especially aware of those links, and how they included the announcer, when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950 at the age of 22. Red Barber, who chose him for the job, was a beloved figure in Brooklyn, and Scully discovered how intimate Ebbets Field was. One day as he sat next to Barber in the broadcasting booth, Scully heard Hilda Chester, a fan legendary for ringing her cowbell and hectoring the opposition, bellow, “Vin Scully, I love you!” When Scully looked down in embarrassment, he heard, “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”2

When the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, they spent four years at the far less intimate Memorial Coliseum, where Scully’s legend really began before they moved, as Scully put it, to “this golden palace on the other side of the horizon.”3 The Coliseum was built for the 1932 Olympics and then used mainly for football, reconfigured for baseball with a 250-foot left-field line with a high screen. Not only did many of those fans have to strain to see the field and the players, but they had little experience with major-league baseball, other than postseason play and weekend network telecasts on CBS and NBC. Many of the fans knew about major-league baseball but had rarely seen it or its players. As Don Drysdale recalled of the team’s move and the Coliseum’s configuration, “From the bottom to top row of seats, it must have been a good block. The fans didn’t only need Vin Scully on the radio to find out what was happening. They needed telescopes.”4 Scully became so well known for fans bringing their radios to the park that for a major Sports Illustrated profile of Scully in 1964, Robert Creamer and his editors titled the article “The Transistor Kid.” Scully said, “I got lucky. I came along about the same time as the transistor radio,” but another sportswriter said, “A lot of people mention that Vin benefited from the transistor radio, but really the transistor radio benefited from Vin.”5

As Scully and the team eagerly awaited the move to Chavez Ravine, he played a role in Dodger Stadium before he started doing play-by-play there. When O’Malley chose September 17, 1959, for the ceremony to begin construction, Scully served as the emcee. As many as 5,000 brought shovels to take home souvenir dirt in boxes the Dodgers provided, and watch the starting lineup run out to the places where they eventually would stand after the stadium’s completion. On Opening Day 1962, Scully emceed the ceremonies dedicating Dodger Stadium, though his prediction that one day it would be expanded to 80,000 seats with space for 25,000 cars has yet to be realized. After the pregame events, he moved to his new home on the third-tier club level next to the press box, a booth that included a seating area in the back and a table built into the front with room for Scully, his colleague Jerry Doggett, and the engineer.

The transistor tradition moved from the Coliseum to Dodger Stadium when it opened in 1962. Scully had to switch from using a microphone to wearing a headset, and his engineer had to adjust the microphones in the booth and around the park to avoid hearing the feedback from the radios in the stands. The Dodgers encouraged the phenomenon: Promotions director Danny Goodman started selling radios at the souvenir stands, and a Los Angeles Times columnist guessed that of 52,000 fans at one game, about 40,000 had radios.6 Fans grew so accustomed to listening to his account of what they saw that Red Patterson, the team’s longtime vice president for public relations, recalled the night a fan called the stadium switchboard from a phone booth in the left-field pavilion and said, “Will you please notify [manager Walt] Alston immediately the men in the bullpen are making too much noise popping pitches into the catcher’s glove? I can’t hear Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett on my transistor.”7 Alston’s successor, Tom Lasorda, said, “Davey Lopes hits a line drive off the wall, comes flying around second and slides head-first into third and not one person in the stadium believes it until Vinnie tells them it’s true.”8

This connection to the fans in the stands may well have made Scully an even better broadcaster than he already was. As Scully explained, “I tell you one thing, it keeps you on your toes. When you know that just about everybody in that ballpark is listening to you describe a play that they’re watching, you’d better call it right. You can’t get lazy and catch up with a pitch that you’ve missed. You can’t fake a play that you’ve called wrong.”9 He took pride that he had never heard from fans that his descriptions had been incorrect.

Even those on the field became part of the transistor tradition. Catcher Norm Sherry recalled sitting in the Dodgers bullpen and being able to hear Scully’s broadcasts from the transistors. When the Cincinnati Reds came to Dodger Stadium in 1969, reliever George Culver, a Californian who later became a Dodger himself, took a radio to the bullpen to listen to Scully and Doggett, and manager Dave Bristol allowed a radio in the dugout. During the game, a pitcher began to throw in the Reds bullpen down the right-field line behind the stands, just out of Scully’s view. Thinking the pitcher was Wayne Granger, and knowing about the radio, Scully said on the air, “George, if that’s Granger warming up, give us a wave.” Culver moved into view and did as Scully had asked.10

Players in the middle of the action also heard Scully’s voice echoing through the ballpark. Nearly a decade before he joined the team, Jerry Reuss pitched at Dodger Stadium for the first time for the St. Louis Cardinals. With the crowd around 20,000, he could recall hearing Scully and figuring out that he was in the middle of a story. “As a courtesy to the best in the business,” he took some time, used the rosin bag, and returned to the rubber. When the crowd laughed, Reuss knew that Scully had finished and resumed pitching. Later, when Reuss broadcast for the Dodgers, he recounted the story to Scully, who “had a laugh about it.”11

Although Scully famously encouraged the Coliseum crowd to wish umpire Frank Secory a happy birthday, he also found ways to involve the Dodger Stadium faithful. In 1963 National League President Warren Giles ordered umpires to enforce the balk rule more stringently, including that a pitcher had to come set for at least one second. The number of balks rose, as did the number of arguments about them, including one at Dodger Stadium that April 24. As Reds manager Fred Hutchinson argued with the umpires, Scully discussed the balk rule, eventually noting how hard it is to figure out exactly how long one second is. He said, “Hey, let’s try something. I’ll get a stopwatch from the engineer.” Then he said, “I’ll push the stopwatch and say, ‘One!’ and when you think one full second has elapsed, you yell, ‘Two!’ Ready? One!” The crowd of more than 19,000 screamed, “Two!” Scully said, “I’m sorry. Only one of you had it right. Let’s try it again. One!” Again, they yelled, “Two!” Someone from the dugout called the booth to find out what was going on.12

Scully also found other ways to include the Dodger Stadium crowds. When the Dodgers clinched the 1965 pennant at home on the next-to-last day of the season, Alston told Scully that since the next game didn’t matter, “How about managing? You tell me on the air what to do. I’ll listen in the dugout, with earphones on, and give directions to the guys,” who were recovering from a night of celebrating their victory. When Ron Fairly, who was not noted for speed, reached first, Scully said, “For those of you with radios, let’s have Fairly steal. Watch Fairly’s face when he … gets the sign.” Scully said that Fairly did a double-take and “sloshed to second, but had to retreat to first after a foul ball.13

Even without being in on strategy, fans in Dodger Stadium played an important role in any Scully broadcast. In a 1966 profile, after Doggett said, “Six minutes until game time,” the author asked, “Are you just a little bit nervous, Vin?” Scully replied, “Not after 17 years. But just wait until a key play – just wait – and my arm will be covered with goose bumps.”14 He often spoke of his love for the roar of the crowd, and the Dodgers’ success in attendance –climbing well above 3.5 million fans in the later years of his tenure – meant that the crowd’s roar would be in evidence. Further, the Dodgers’ success – the team had only 13 losing seasons in Scully’s 67 years with the team – meant that fans had ample reason to make noise during his broadcasts. And Scully became well known for what broadcasters referred to as “laying out” – enabling listeners to enjoy the excitement of the fans in the ballpark and “to let the crowd noise tell the story.” Scully said, “On the road, it’s slightly different. In Milwaukee, when the Braves first landed there, the crowds would react to a good Dodger play with stony Prussian silence. You don’t know what silence is until you’ve heard a Milwaukee crowd react to a home run by Duke Snider. I’m captivated by crowd noises – like, oh, when an L.A. crowd boos Juan Marichal as if he were a landlord not giving enough steam heat in the winter.”15

 

Scully admitted to one time when the Dodger Stadium crowd carried him into an emotional reaction he apparently never repeated. Although he said, “I am not neutral. You cannot travel with and live with and become friends with members of a team and not want them to do well,” he prided himself on his on-air objectivity.16 On at least one occasion, though, he had to find a way to vent his support for the Dodgers. He recounted to the Los Angeles Times that after a Dodger delivered a key hit in a game against the Giants, “[s]uddenly, that tremendous animal roar of the crowd got to me. I felt like I was going to explode. I had to do something. I leaned out of the booth and started pounding my fist on the façade of the stadium. None of the listeners knew what I was doing, though. I’d at least pressed the cough button on the mike, the only time I ever did that. When I finally got the fist-pounding out of my system, I resumed announcing as calmly as I could. One of the letters I got later asked how in the world I could be so cool and detached during such an exciting game.”17

Scully’s connection with the fans in the stands became well known beyond his home ballpark and even entered popular culture. Terry O’Neil, who as CBS Sports’ executive producer based in New York helped prompt Scully to leave the network for NBC’s Game of the Week when he denied him the chance to broadcast the Super Bowl, wrote that his “great respect” for Scully included having “joined his worshipers for the ‘transistor stereo rites’ one evening in Dodger Stadium.”18 Dodgers fans became known for leaving the game early, and Dick Young, the New York Daily News columnist who often criticized the Dodgers and their fans, praised his old friend Scully when he suggested that they left the stadium early because “they feel they can walk out, listening, without missing a thing.”19

In another example of Scully’s impact, Kevin Fagan, who grew up in Southern California and has drawn the comic strip Drabble since 1979, paid tribute to him in numerous strips. One Sunday strip captured how the tradition of listening to Scully at the ballpark continued. In his later seasons, Scully broadcast only on television, with the first three innings simulcast on radio. Fans still sought access, as Fagan wryly noted. At the beginning of Scully’s final season in 2016, Fagan depicted the family wondering where the father, Ralph, had been for the past three innings. They found him in the men’s room with several other people, looking at the monitor, where they heard, “Did I ever tell you about the time Jackie Robinson and I raced on ice skates?”20 That was not unusual: Fans continued to bring their radios to Dodger Stadium for the rest of his tenure, and would congregate around monitors spread throughout the concession areas to watch and listen.

When Scully retired at the end of the 2016 season, the connection between him and the ballpark remained. A retirement ceremony attracted a full house. After the final regular-season game, manager Dave Roberts spoke to him from the field and Scully addressed the crowd from the booth, where a banner said, “I’ll miss you,” signed, “Vin.” Scully returned for ceremonial occasions – to throw out a first ball and for two inductions into the Ring of Honor: his own and that of his friend Jaime Jarrín, the team’s Spanish-language voice for 64 years (only three fewer than Scully). After Scully died on August 2, 2022, at the first home game afterward, Roberts addressed the crowd, the pitcher’s mound included “Vin” and a microphone embedded in the dirt, and his television successor, Joe Davis, joined analyst Orel Hershiser in dropping a banner from his old booth saying, “Vin – We’ll miss you! Dodger Fans.” More than ever, Dodger Stadium had become what sportswriter Rick Reilly called it in 1985: “Scully’s shrine.”21

Yet Scully saw it as a shrine of a different sort. He had been close to the longtime owners, the O’Malleys. Walter O’Malley had hoped Dodger Stadium would be “a monument to the O’Malleys.”22 Scully told Kirk McKnight, “The biggest thing about Dodger Stadium – certainly in July, August, September – when the air is clear and you are looking out beyond the pavilions, you would see the mountains, and you would remember the words from the song and the words ‘the purple mountains’ majesty’ and that’s out there for all the world to see. It’s a beautiful ballpark.” He recalled the effort that O’Malley put into planning and building the ballpark. “Mr. O’Malley loved the earth. He loved flowers, and so we have a lot of that as well,” Scully said. He concluded, “It’s a great tribute to the game, it’s a great tribute to baseball, and it’s a great tribute to Walter O’Malley, so, all in all, it’s a rather sacred place for me.”23 Scully helped make it into a marvelous place for Dodger fans.

MICHAEL GREEN is chair of the history department and professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and president of the Las Vegas Maddux Brothers Chapter of SABR.

 

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank his friends and fellow SABR members David Tanenhaus and Rob Sheinkopf for their comments on this article.

 

Notes

1 Rich Wolfe, Vin Scully: I Saw It on the Radio (N.P., A Tribute Book, 2006), 197-98.

2 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Baseball (Florentine Films, 1994), Episode 6 at 42:29.

3 Tom Hoffarth, “Scully Recalls Culture Shock of L.A. Move 50 Years Ago,” San Bernardino (California) Sun, March 28, 2008, https://www.sbsun.com/2008/03/28/scully-recalls-culture-shock-of-la-move-50-years-ago/.

4 Don Drysdale with Bob Verdi, Once a Bum, Always a Dodger: My Life in Baseball from Brooklyn to Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 78.

5 Robert Creamer, “The Transistor Kid,” Sports Illustrated, May 4, 1964, https://vault.si.com/vault/1964/05/04/the-transistor-kid.

6 Don Page, “The Radio Beat: Transistor Testimonial to Scully,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1963: B30.

7 Dick Kaegel, “Even Writers Toss Bouquets at Scully, Dodger Ace on Air,” The Sporting News, July 16, 1966: 36.

8 Rick Reilly, “Vin Scully: In 36 Years as Voice of the Dodgers, He’s Never Been at Loss for Words,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1985: D1, 10-11.

9 Creamer, “The Transistor Kid.”

10 Wolfe, Vin Scully, 148; Charles Maher, “Help from the Bullpen,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1969: Part III, 2.

11 Ron Kantowski, “The Night Jerry Reuss Helped Vin Scully Finish a Story,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 6, 2022, https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/sports-columns/ron-kantowski/the-night-jerry-reuss-helped-vin-scully-finish-a-story-2619202/; Jerry Reuss, Bring in the Right-Hander! My Twenty-Two Years in the Major Leagues (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 57.

12 Creamer, “The Transistor Kid”; Kaegel, “Even Writers Toss Bouquets at Scully.”

13 Curt Smith, Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story (Washington: Potomac Books, 2010), 102-03; Rich Wolfe, Vin Scully: I Saw It on the Radio, 128. Scully’s recollection after the foul ball had Fairly stealing the base, but Fairly did not end up stealing a base in the game in question. See https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1965/B10030LAN1965.htm.

14 Donald Freeman, “Scully: Old Pro of the Dodgers,” San Pedro (California) News-Pilot, May 27, 1966: 10.

15 Freeman.

16 Bill Libby, “Vin Scully: How I Announce a World Series,” in Zander Hollander, ed., The Complete Handbook of Baseball: 1975 Edition (New York: Associated Features and New American Library, 1975), 8.

17 John Hall, “Vin or the Egg?” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1970: Part III, 2. Scully’s memory was legendary, and he demonstrated it here: He thought he had reacted to a key triple by outfielder Lee Walls. The only triple Walls hit with the Dodgers was not in a crucial situation and occurred against the Philadelphia Phillies in the seventh inning, when Doggett would have been broadcasting; that hit did give the Dodgers the lead. But in the second game of the 1962 playoff against the Giants, with the Dodgers needing to win to force a third game and starting the inning down 5-0, Walls doubled in the sixth, scoring two runs and advancing to third on the throw, and giving the Dodgers a 6-5 lead. See https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1962/B08090LAN1962.htm; https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1962/B10020LAN1962.htm.

18 Terry O’Neil, The Game Behind the Game: High Stakes, High Pressure in Television Sports (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 93.

19 Smith, Pull Up a Chair, 91.

20 Kevin Roderick, “Drabble cartoonist’s tribute to Vin Scully,” LA Observed, October 14, 2013, http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2013/10/drabble_cartoonists_tribu.php; https://drabble.substack.com/p/this-day-in-drabble-history-vin-scully?sd=pf.

21 Reilly, “Scully.”

22 Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 389.

23 Kirk McKnight, The Voices of Baseball: The Game’s Greatest Broadcasters Reflect on America’s Pastime (Updated edition, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), 26.