Vin Scully was my hero. Of course he was: he was family.
They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. I didn’t have a choice in the matter. The larger-than-life hero in my life was Vin Scully. For millions of people, he was like a member of the family. For me, he was. He was my mom’s brother, and it was just the two of them. How could he not be my hero? He died Tuesday at 94, just shy of the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death. He lived as rich and meaningful a life as any man could hope for, yet he endured many tragedies. We shall miss him deeply, as will the whole world of baseball.
Vin’s story was the story of my family, and the story of so many American families: up from nowhere, and East to West. All four of my grandparents, including Vin’s mother and stepfather, immigrated to America in the 1920s. Some came with little, some with nothing. My grandmother was born Bridget Freehill in Ireland in 1900, a subject of Queen Victoria. She was shot at during the Easter Rising in 1916. She was a strong, tough, opinionated redheaded lady, a survivor, and the kind of traditional Irishwoman who always wore a nice hat to church. She lived to be 97. She came to America with a letter of reference from the clothing store in Dublin where she worked after coming south from County Cavan. Those were troublesome times in that troubled place, and New York was a fresh start.
She married an Irishman, Vincent Scully, and gave birth to their son in the Bronx in November 1927, but her husband died young. Vin was four. My grandmother took him back to Ireland for a while — falling back on relations, as one does, after a death in the family. In her 1932 passport photo, as was done in those days, Vin is with her, looking grave in a blazer.
My grandmother’s passport
Even without remembering much of it, a little of his time on the Emerald Isle always stayed with Vin in his style, but also in his abiding sense of both tragedy and hope as one’s lifelong companions. One of his great baseball lines, on discussing a player who was listed as day-to-day: “Aren’t we all?”
Back in New York, my grandmother settled in Washington Heights. The Depression was not a great time to be a single mom, and she married a sailor — an Englishman who, they later determined, had worked on the ship that carried her here the first time. They had my mother in 1935. My grandfather was really the only father Vin ever knew. He was earthy, practical, patient, and (having been raised Anglican) not a churchgoing man. He’d joined the British Navy at 13 in the First World War and been taught to swim literally by “sink or swim”: They threw the new boys off the ship in the harbor and told them what to do. He knew every knot known to man.
Washington Heights in those days was full of working-class immigrants, as it is today. In the 1930s, they were mostly white ethnics, but of many and varied backgrounds. My father’s family — immigrants from Scotland — lived there, too. Kids played stickball in the streets. Vin was a Giants fan, and Mel Ott was his hero. As he would tell the story, it was his sympathy for the underdog that started it: the Giants getting clobbered by the Yankees in Game Two of the 1936 World Series. But as much as anything, what entranced him as a kid was just sitting under the radio (radios were big things with legs in those days, like 1970s televisions) and letting the roar of the crowd wash over him.
At a very young age, Vin decided that he wanted to be a baseball announcer. Bear in mind: This was a kid from a working-class immigrant family, and baseball had been barely on the radio for a decade. Sports broadcasting scarcely even existed as a profession, much less one that could be learned by the son of a sailor who knew nobody who was anybody. But when he was still young, a doctor told my grandmother that Vin would make a living with his voice. I’m not sure if she believed that as much then as she did later. A few years back, after cleaning out my dad’s house, I sent Vin a package of things my grandmother had saved, which included all of his high-school report cards. One teacher had given him a B+ in public speaking. Must have been a very tough grader. That’s how Catholic schools were then.
Then, the war came. At 17, Vin enlisted in the Navy, and was sent to Williamsburg, Va., to train. It was 1944. Nobody knew how long the war would last, but he was fortunate: It ended before the Navy was done training him.
Like a lot of young men whose lives were interrupted by the war, Vin came back and went to college. It was a great time for a baseball-mad kid with a good voice and not much baseball talent to land at Fordham. He played the outfield, and even played against George H. W. Bush, then at Yale, but he couldn’t hit much. Still, the Fordham radio station was in its infancy, and it was a great place to train for a radio market that was just taking off, and a TV market hardly anybody really saw coming.
He sent a lot of résumés and got a lot of rejections, but he landed a gig covering college football for CBS, and he hopped around the country on College Football Roundup getting updates from broadcasters at games across the land. His biggest break was a Maryland–Boston University game at Fenway Park, a game he was called to cover as a fill-in for Ernie Harwell. He made an impression on Red Barber, hosting in the studio, who kept going back to Vin because the game was close and few others were. Not rating a spot in the broadcast booth, he called the game from an unpleasant rooftop in miserable weather. He never complained about the accommodations, which also impressed Barber when he found out. Barber talked Branch Rickey into hiring Vin to join the Brooklyn Dodgers broadcasting team.
It was 1950. He was 22 years old. Nobody would have that opportunity today; almost nobody did then, and the guy who got it was a nobody at the time. But he held the job for 67 years.
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The Dodgers were a veteran team, which put Vin in the unusual position for a broadcaster of being younger than most of the ballplayers. Once, he even got to call a home run by an opposing player who had been a classmate. He had to work to maintain some professional distance; it helped that he had grown up a Giants fan in a part of New York that was full of Yankees fans, so he never lost sight of the need to call games for the road fans as well as the homers. Still, he always had an affection for that first Dodgers team — for Gil Hodges and Pee Wee Reese and Carl Erskine (whose two no-hitters he called, in 1952 and 1956) and, of course, Jackie Robinson.
One of Vin’s most beloved stories, which he would tell on air maybe once a year, was about ice skating with Jackie Robinson. Vin knew how to skate. Jackie Robinson, who was born in Georgia and raised in Southern California, did not, but . . . well, I will let Vin tell the story, because it reveals something essential about Robinson’s character:
Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers had integrated baseball three years before Vin started. Those were still tough times for the team’s black players, and Vin had a front-row seat to the struggle and what they endured. The first televised World Series was also in 1947. Those were just two of many changes in the game and its players between 1950 and Vin’s retirement in 2016: expansion, air travel, free agency, international players, you name it. He was there for Fernandomania in 1981, and for Hideo Nomo in 1995.
Those Brooklyn Dodgers, still beloved by so many now-aging fans who grew up with them, were a story of heartbreak and hope who lost the World Series in 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953, lost the pennant on the last day to Dick Sisler’s tenth inning home run in 1950, and again to Bobby Thomson’s walkoff in 1951. Vin called Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World,” but his call is lost to history; we only have the famous call by Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges because a Giants fan had a tape recorder by the radio. But when the Dodgers finally won it all in 1955, Vin pulled one of his signature moves: letting the crowd roar at length before adding his own benediction.
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“Local boy makes good” is one American story; the frontier is another. America was moving West in the 1950s, the Dodgers moved there too in 1958, and so did Vin and his first wife, Joan. My mom stayed in New York, worked as a secretary, and married a cop. My family never did all live in one place again.
But California was where he was needed. The conventional wisdom was that Los Angeles was not a good baseball town; that’s why Horace Stoneham, when offered a choice by Walter O’Malley, preferred San Francisco. But the Dodgers made it a baseball town in short order, and while winning a World Series in 1959 was a major factor, Vin was also a huge part of why. The L.A. Coliseum was vast, and the transistor radio was coming into its own in the late 1950s, so Dodgers fans — some of them new converts to baseball — brought radios to the game and listened to Vin describe the action they were squinting at.
Vin felt like family to so many Dodgers fans because he was present: Not just because he was there so many days and nights of so many long seasons, but because he understood the intimacy of the spoken word at the leisurely pace of baseball. With his meticulous preparation and his ever-growing well of stories, he never ran out of something to say, even working in the booth alone. And he always had a special can’t-be-faked love for the kids in the stands, having six of his own. His combination of eloquence, warmth, and class was hard to top, and as the decades wore on, he stood as a kind of ambassador for the past — for the virtues of a generation born in the 1920s and forged by depression and war.
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In the Sixties, he also got to be friends with a neighbor and fellow transplant who became California’s governor: Ronald Reagan. Vin was a conservative guy, but just as he called games for both sides, he was rarely political in public, especially during game time. California Democrats even tried to recruit him to run for office in 1964. The only two “political” things he made a point of on air were respect for the sacrifices of America’s veterans (he made an annual point of commemorating D-Day) and respect for the American flag. In 1976, he called the famous rescue by Rick Monday of the flag from some knuckleheads who were about to burn it on the field:
Vin made no secret of his friendship with Reagan, whom he respected greatly. He interviewed the president-elect for the Thanksgiving halftime show in 1980, a puff-piece sports conversation that was Reagan’s first sit-down interview since his election. He had Reagan in the booth in 1989 at the All-Star Game, calling Bo Jackson’s home run. He attended the inauguration and did some other events at the Rose Garden and the Kennedy Center. I can remember as a teenager Vin telling us that Reagan had greeted him in the Oval Office with, “Vin, you’re the only person I’ll see all week who isn’t asking me for anything.”
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It would be comical to even attempt to recount the big moments he called on the air. Sandy Koufax’s no-hitters. Henry Aaron’s 715th home run. Dwight Clark’s “The Catch,” which was actually the last NFL game he called. Jack Morris’s Opening Day no-hitter, which was Vin’s debut on NBC’s Game of the Week. Kirk Gibson’s epic 1988 home run. The 1986 World Series: The highlight of my life at age 15, and we huddled around the TV as my uncle called the ball through Buckner’s legs.
He did football, golf, tennis, bowling, a variety show, you name it. The most impressive thing I ever saw him do was a golf tournament that got rained out. Golf never gets rained out, due to where and when it is played, but this one was. It was maybe around 1990. That left Vin with one of the most terrifying things that can confront anyone in broadcast television: three hours of network airtime to fill with no programming, no script, and no notice. But decades of baseball had prepared him for nothing if not the ability to fill time. They set up a tent, and he gathered the golfers, and told stories. Professional golfers are not the most interesting people in the world, given the solitary nature of their profession, its obsessive demands, and how the game rewards few things more than calm. But somehow, he managed to make it an afternoon of entertaining television. Who else could have pulled that off?
He never wrote a memoir. He never needed to. Every story he had to tell that could be spoken of in public he spun on the air. He made baseball broadcasting sound like literature. Of course, I grew up a baseball fanatic, with Vin as an uncle. And a fanatic about talking about the game, studying it, and understanding it.
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As a cop’s son growing up in the New York suburbs in the 1970s, I treated a visit from Uncle Vin as something on the order of having Batman drop by the house. Any other time, we were ordinary people, but he was a Star. He got us down on the field to meet Tom Seaver and Don Sutton and the rest at my first baseball game, when I was four. We’d hang out by the front window trying to guess what color rental car he was driving. But then, we’d go to a nearby diner, because it was where my grandmother liked to go. I have a vivid memory from those years of Vin and my dad, both in shirt and tie, changing a tire in the parking lot at Hogan’s Diner.
The greatest moment, of course, was his Hall of Fame induction in 1982, when I was ten, for which we got to stay in the Otesaga Hotel with all the Hall of Famers. One morning at breakfast, the table behind us was all the oldest guys: Bill Terry, Bill Dickey, Charlie Gehringer. It was a card collection come to life. I sat with Warren Spahn on the bus ride to the induction.
It was a brutally hot day, and we all came home cursing Happy Chandler, who spoke endlessly. Hank Aaron, who went last, must have thrown out his prepared text (we could see his parents, who had been sharecroppers in Alabama, suffering in the sun) and mostly thanked people. Vin’s speech, which had the advantage of being early in the day, was a masterpiece of concision, humility, gratitude, faith, and awe:
I do not give too much away, and likely will not surprise anyone, in saying that the private Vin was exactly the same as the public Vin. He was generous and even-tempered and in every sense a gentleman. When he called the house, he broadcasted: you could hear his voice coming out of the phone halfway across the room. In later years, a voicemail from Vin was a small treasure in itself, with a beginning, an anecdote, and a conclusion.
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Vin’s Catholic faith was deep, and it carried him through many trials. So did family. His first wife died tragically young around the same time my oldest brother died at age seven. Vin’s daughter came to live with us for a summer, and my grandparents went to California for a few years until Vin remarried. Family gets through these things together. His oldest son, my cousin Michael, died in a helicopter crash while his wife was expecting their second child, who was born that day. It was devastating. Vin was married to his second wife, Sandi, until her death after a long illness in 2020. He bore his crosses the only way he knew how: with faith.
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At a certain point in my writing career, I decided not to mention my connection to Vin, partly so I wouldn’t be trading on his good name for attention, and partly — as I moved further into the combative arena of politics — so I wouldn’t give him any headaches. The one time he mentioned me on air, at least that I know of, was the first game back after 9/11, given that I had worked in the World Trade Center and been there that day. A few readers put two and two together, but I really only had a few readers then anyway. But eulogies are a time for sharing.
There was a great gift in growing up knowing someone who had literally talked his way from nowhere into the Hall of Fame, who had become the best at what he did. He was my hero because of who he was and how he lived his life in public and in private, but also because he represented all the American possibilities — and that you could do great things and still be good.
This article has been emended since publication to cite the correct World Series game in which the Giants were blown out by the Yankees, and the circumstances of the Giants’ move West.
