So Harvey Kuenn is batting for Bob Hendley. The time on the scoreboard is nine forty-four. The date, September the ninth, nineteen sixty-five, and Koufax, working on veteran Harvey Kuenn. Sandy into his windup, and the pitch: a fastball, for a strike.
He has struck out, by the way, five consecutive batters, and that’s gone unnoticed. Sandy ready, and the strike-one pitch: Very high, and he lost his hat. He really forced that one. That’s only the second time tonight where I have had the feeling that Sandy threw instead of pitched, trying to get that little extra, and that time he tried so hard his hat fell off. He took an extremely long stride to the plate and Torborg had to go up to get it.
One and one to Harvey Kuenn. Now he’s ready. Fastball high, ball two. You can’t blame a man for pushing just a little bit now.
Sandy backs off, mops his forehead, runs his left index finger along his forehead, and dries it off on his left pants leg, all the while Kuenn just waiting. Now Sandy looks in, into his windup, and the two-one pitch to Kuenn: Swung on and missed, strike two.
It is nine forty-six p.m. Two and two to Harvey Kuenn. One strike away. Sandy into his windup. Here’s the pitch. Swung on and missed, a perfect game!
[Crowd noise for 40 seconds.]
On the scoreboard in right field, it is nine forty-six p.m. in the City of the Angels, Los Angeles, California, and a crowd of twenty-nine thousand, one hundred and thirty-nine just sitting in to see the only pitcher in baseball history to hurl four no-hit, no-run games. He has done it four straight years, and now he capped it: On his fourth no-hitter, he made it a perfect game — and Sandy Koufax, whose name will always remind you of strikeouts, did it with a flourish. He struck out the last six consecutive batters, so, when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record books, that K stands out even more than the O U F A X.
— Vin Scully, Dodger Stadium, September 9, 1965
Those may be the most lyrical few minutes of baseball you’ll ever hear, Vin Scully’s narration of the last at-bat of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game. It’s hard enough to speak graceful sentences when you’re explaining what you already know and have thought out. Try doing it when you’re reporting what’s happening in front of you at a hundred miles an hour, the approximate speed of Koufax’s fastball.
Scully did more than find pretty good words, though that might have been achievement enough. He gave them his distinctive intonation. Above, you see the sheet music, as it were. Listen to the sound he gave it.
He was blessed with a great radio voice, clear and easy on the ears, and with a certain New York phonetic style — “accent” would be too strong a word — of making English words sound crisper and cleaner than they do in the mouths of some of us from other parts of the country. In the passage above, he twice says “forehead” and pronounces it as one syllable, or maybe a syllable and a quarter. It’s elegant.
Because music is what’s in the silence between the notes, Scully turned the microphone over to the crowd after the last pitch of the game, for 40 long seconds. They weren’t silent, but he was. The dramatic touch was suited to the moment. What a deft move.
He did the same for Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, which he called for NBC TV: “High fly ball, into right field. She is—gone!” and then for the next minute he let the 56,000 fans crammed into Dodger Stadium do the talking. (Gibson had entered the game, two out in the bottom of the ninth, with an injured left hamstring and an injured right knee — a Hail Mary pinch-hitter. Squirming in the left batter’s box, the count one and two, he was “shaking his left leg, making it quiver like a horse trying to get rid of a troublesome fly.”)
Scully’s naming the day, time, and place in the last inning of Koufax’s perfect game 23 years earlier lent his on-air improvisation of that event a stately tone, but that wasn’t his intention. He wanted to provide the dateline and some timestamps, that’s all. As Koufax took his perfect game into the late innings, Scully asked his sound engineer to start taping. (Few game broadcasts were recorded back then.) The idea was to give Koufax the tape as a keepsake and document of his feat.
The voice of the Dodgers for 67 (mostly) sunny seasons, and recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award (40 years ago already) at the Baseball Hall of Fame, within shouting distance of the plaque of fellow Fordham alumnus Frankie Frisch, Vincent Edward Scully died yesterday in Los Angeles, age 94. Requiescat in pace.