America at Large: Vin Scully’s lilt a soundtrack to a bygone age

After her husband Vincent died of pneumonia in the Bronx in 1932, Bridget Scully needed, like any emigrant, to feel the warm, familiar embrace of home. With her four-year-old son Vincent jnr by the hand, she boarded a ship bound for Ireland, the country she thought she had left forever. Mother and child spent long enough in the comforting maw of the extended Freehill family in Cavan that the red-haired tyke returned to New York sounding a little bit different than when he left.

"She told me later that when we came back, I had a brogue you could cut with a knife," said the kid who would grow up to be Vin Scully, the most revered voice in the history of American sports broadcasting. While the last vestiges of the Irish accent disappeared long ago, his lyricism with a microphone in hand would often be attributed to his ethnicity by those searching for clues to his peculiar genius.

This Monday, Scully will call the Los Angeles Dodgers' opening game of the new baseball campaign against the San Diego Padres, kicking off his 67th and final season in the commentary booth. Imagine somebody who combined the flair of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh and the casual authority of Michael O'Hehir and you go some way to understanding why so many in America have always dreaded this day.

Ground-breaking

When he first took the mike in 1950, the Dodgers played at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, Jackie Robinson was their ground-breaking second baseman, and President Harry Truman had just ordered the first hydrogen bomb.

The kid was fresh out of Fordham University where he’d played baseball against Yale for whom George HW Bush manned first base.

In a sports world where longevity can often blur perspective and the list of those who have overstayed their welcome is lengthy and growing, Scully is the rarest of things. He departs the stage in his prime. At the age of 88. Sure, concessions have been made to the advancing years. In recent seasons, he has worked mostly home games but, even on this rationed schedule, the voice of the Dodgers has somehow remained the voice of the national pastime.

Already bristling at the amount of coverage his valedictory campaign is about to get from an adoring media, the outsized attention is inevitable because when Scully goes a part of sporting lore goes with him and is perhaps lost forever. Stubborn young boys who once listened to his games on radios underneath the blankets long after they were supposed to be fast asleep are now rheumy-eyed grandfathers eavesdropping his broadcasts on phones or iPads.

They are still mainlining that familiar baritone voice, the distinctly evocative way with words that fired their childhood imaginations. In a world where nothing stays the same, Scully has been a constant in so many lives, a nightly, wistful reminder of simpler times, when the game seemed to and probably did matter more.

In 1965, he called Sandy Koufax's perfect game (the ne plus ultra of pitching) against the Chicago Cubs, a commentary masterpiece so exquisite in the way it captured live history that a transcript of the ninth inning features in an anthology of baseball literature. The simple, declarative beauty of every line epitomised his devotion to telling a story as unobtrusively as possible.

“And Koufax with a new ball, takes a hitch at his belt and walks behind the mound,” said Scully at one point in the drama. “I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world.”

Yet, perhaps the most eloquent feature of that soliloquy is the fact he allowed 39 seconds of silence to lapse at the final out so those listening in at home could savour the roar of the crowd and share in the delight. Unlike so many blabbermouth commentators who came after him, trotting out rehearsed catchphrases in a desperate quest for cultural relevance, for Scully the needs of his audience came first. Always. That selflessness may also explain the ease with which he moved from radio to television.

There are different ways to gauge the magnitude of his enduring impact. When the Los Angeles Times asked fans to vote the 20 most influential sports figures in the city's history, he finished third, behind Koufax and Magic Johnson, ahead of iconic figures like Kobe Bryant, Wayne Gretzky and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

"Vin Scully's voice is better known to most Los Angelenos than their next-door neighbour's is," wrote Robert Creamer in Sports Illustrated. "He has become a celebrity. He is stared at in the street. Kids hound him for autographs.

Truly astonishing

“Out-of-town visitors at ball games in Dodger Stadium have Scully pointed out to them – as though he were the Empire State Building – as he sits in his broadcasting booth describing a game, his left hand lightly touching his temple in a characteristic pose that his followers dote on and which, for them, has come to be his trademark.”

What is truly astonishing is Creamer delivered that encomium in 1964 when Scully was just 36 years old, still young enough for the headline to dub him “The Transistor Kid”, an acknowledgement of how many fans brought radios to the ballpark each day to listen to his play-by-play commentary supplement the action. The transistors have long since been consigned to history. The kid stays in the picture. For one more magical year.