Vincent Edward Scully (November 29, 1927 – August 2, 2022) was an American sportscaster, best known for his broadcast work in Major League Baseball. Scully was the play-by-play announcer for the Brooklyn / Los Angeles Dodgers for 67 years, beginning in 1950 and ending in 2016.
Born in the Bronx, New York City, Scully attended Fordham University where he played baseball before becoming a student broadcaster and journalist. After being mentored by Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber early in his career, Scully was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950, and moved with them to Los Angeles in 1958. He became known for his distinctive tenor voice and lyrically descriptive style. Scully's tenure with the Dodgers was the longest of any broadcaster with a single team in professional sports history. He retired at age 88 after the 2016 season.
In addition to Dodgers baseball, Scully called various nationally televised football and golf contests for CBS Sports from 1975 to 1982, and was the lead baseball play-by-play announcer for NBC Sports from 1983 to 1989. He also called the World Series for CBS Radio from 1979 to 1982 and again from 1990 to 1997.
For his long and distinguished career, Scully was honored with a star of the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame and NAB Broadcasting Hall of Fame. For his services to baseball, he was honored with the Ford C. Frick Award by the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982. Prior to his final season, the Dodgers honored Scully by renaming the street leading towards Dodger Stadium to "Vin Scully Avenue". That same year, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. After a long illness, Scully died on August 2, 2022, at his home in Hidden Hills, California.
Born on November 29, 1927, in the Bronx, Scully grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. His father, Vincent Aloysius Scully, was a silk salesman; his mother, Bridget (née Freehill), was a homemaker. He was of Irish descent. His biological father died of pneumonia when Scully was four, and his mother later married an English merchant sailor named Allan Reeve, whom Scully considered "my dad". He had one sibling, a younger sister who died of brain cancer in 2002, aged 67. Scully attended Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. He worked delivering beer and mail, pushing garment racks and cleaning silver in the basement of the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City.
Scully discovered his love of baseball at age eight when he saw the results of the second game of the 1936 World Series at a laundromat and felt a pang of sympathy for the badly defeated New York Giants, who had lost the game 18–4 to the New York Yankees. Since he lived near the Polo Grounds and because he was a member of the NYC Police Athletic League and Catholic Youth Organization, he was able to attend games for free and became a "very big Giants fan".
After serving in the United States Navy for two years, Scully began his career as a student broadcaster and journalist at Fordham University, where he majored in English. While at Fordham, he helped found its FM radio station WFUV (which now presents a Vin Scully Lifetime Achievement Award each year), was assistant sports editor for Volume 28 of The Fordham Ram his senior year, sang in a barbershop quartet, played center field for the Fordham Rams baseball team, called radio broadcasts for Rams baseball, football, and basketball, earned a degree, and sent about 150 letters to stations along the Eastern seaboard. He received only one response, from CBS Radio affiliate WTOP in Washington, D.C., which hired him as a fill-in.
Red Barber, the sports director of the CBS Radio Network, recruited Scully for its college football coverage. Scully impressed his boss with his coverage of a November 1949 University of Maryland versus Boston University football game from frigid Fenway Park in Boston, despite having to do so from the stadium roof. Expecting an enclosed press box, Scully had left his coat and gloves at his hotel, but never mentioned his discomfort on the air; the game proved an exciting affair that attracted Barber to ask him for further assignments. Barber mentored Scully, and Scully would follow Barber's advice on being an impartial announcer without blatant "homer" connections. When the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, management had approached Scully about taking a pro-Dodger tone now that the team was the only one in its city (as the minor league Los Angeles teams had done) to which Scully responded weeks later by saying he would stick to objective and factual coverage.
After Ernie Harwell left the Dodgers' radio and television booths for the crosstown Giants before the 1950 season, Scully replaced him, joining Barber and Connie Desmond.
When Barber got into a salary dispute with World Series sponsor Gillette prior to the 1953 World Series, Scully took Barber's spot in the NBC television booth, becoming the youngest person to broadcast a World Series (a record that stands to this day). After Barber subsequently left the Dodgers to work for the New York Yankees beginning in 1954, Scully became the team's principal announcer, working with Desmond (1954–56), André Baruch (1954–55), Al Helfer (1955–57), and Jerry Doggett (1957). Scully was in the booth when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the 1955 World Series, their only championship in Brooklyn. He announced Dodgers games in Brooklyn until 1957, after which the club moved to Los Angeles.
Beginning with the 1958 season, Scully accompanied the Dodgers to their new location and quickly became popular in Southern California. During the Dodgers' first four seasons in Los Angeles, inexperienced baseball fans had difficulty following the action in the very large Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and it soon became common for them to bring transistor radios to the games to hear Scully and Jerry Doggett describe the action, a practice that continued even after the team moved to the much smaller Dodger Stadium for the 1962 baseball season. Radio and television engineers often had difficulty compensating for the sound of Scully's play-by-play reverberating through the stands at Dodgers home games.
In 1964, the New York Yankees offered Scully the job to replace the recently fired Mel Allen as their lead play-by-play announcer. Scully declined the offer and chose to remain with the Dodgers. By 1976, his popularity in Los Angeles had become such that Dodger fans voted him the "most memorable personality" in the history of the franchise.
Before 1966, local announcers exclusively called the World Series. Typically, the Gillette Company, the Commissioner of Baseball and NBC television would choose the announcers, who would represent each of the teams that were in the World Series for the respective year. For the 1966 World Series, Curt Gowdy called half of each game before ceding the microphone to Vin Scully in Los Angeles, and Chuck Thompson in Baltimore. Scully was not satisfied with the arrangement as he said "What about the road? My fans won't be able to hear me." In Game 1 of the 1966 World Series, Scully called the first 4½ innings. When Gowdy inherited the announcing reins, Scully was so upset that he refused to say another word.
Unlike the typical modern style in which multiple sportscasters have an on-air conversation (usually with one functioning as play-by-play announcer and another as color commentator), Scully and his broadcast partners Jerry Doggett (1956–87) and Ross Porter (1977–2004) each called their innings solo, rotating between radio and television, with Scully working the entire game except for the 3rd and 7th innings. When Doggett retired after the 1987 season, he was replaced by Hall-of-Fame Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, who previously broadcast games for the California Angels. Drysdale died in his hotel room following a heart attack before a game against the Montreal Expos in 1993, resulting in a very difficult broadcast for Scully and Porter, who were told of the death but could not mention it on-air until Drysdale's family had been notified and the official announcement of the death made. Scully announced the news of his death by saying, "Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart." Former outfielder Rick Monday succeeded Drysdale in the Dodgers' broadcast crew.