In 1950, William Faulkner wrote the Nobel Prize for Literature, “Tokyo Rose” went to prison, and South Pacific cried gotcha to the soul. More enduringly, Vin Scully, 22, joined Red Barber at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field: ultimately, the Roy Hobbs of baseball broadcasting, “the best there ever was.”

           

Each game Scully asked the listener to “pull up a chair,” inviting and compelling. Recently his first-ever biography, Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story, was released. Booklist hails “a synchronicity between author and subject that’s as seemingly effortless and beautiful as a perfectly executed double play.” The book is already in a second printing.            

           

This year the American Sportscasters Association named Scully “The Top Sportscaster of All-Time”: at 81, still baseball’s lingua franca, refusing to deviance- or dumb-down.  May I tell you about my book and its subject: a nonpareil announcer, and career?

 

Youth As Prologue

 

Pull Up a Chair begins with irony:  Born in the Yankees’ Bronx in 1927, the son of Irish immigrants became a childhood Giants fan!  The �migr�s often walked Vin in a baby carriage across Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus. “Vincent,” mother Bridget later said, “I dream that you will study here.”

           

Scully’s family lived on a fifth-floor flat in the Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan, within walking distance of the Polo Grounds and the Big Ballpark in the Bronx. “It is written that in every childhood a door will open,” Vin once said, “and there’s a quick glimpse of the future.” His door opened at eight years of age.

           

In Scully’s home sat a huge radio: “One of those deals,” Vin said, “a monster with a wooden cross piece under it for support, its receiver high off the ground.” Each Saturday he opened a box of crackers, poured a glass of milk, and literally crawled under the radio – sat under it -and heard Bill Stern, among others, broadcast college football.

           

“The sound washed over me,” Scully said, “like water out of a showerhead”: a tyke already intoxicated by the crowd. At 10, he and classmates were asked by the good Catholics Nuns what each hoped to be.  Most said a doctor, nurse, lawyer. Vin said, “I want to be a sportscaster.”

           

Youth as prologue: Vin worked his way through Fordham Preparatory School, entered its University in 1944, spent a year in the Navy, then returned to campus. Friends recall him lugging a heavy tape recorder, broadcasting sotto voce. Scully played center field on the baseball team: good-field, no-hit, and very fast.  His nickname: The Phantom.

           

In 1947, Fordham trekked to New Haven to play Yale: its first baseman my future boss and friend: George H.W. Bush. Yale won, 2-1. As the 41^st President said, years later, in a Scully video: “If I remember correctly, when we played each other, we each went 0 for 3.”

           

Red By Any Name

 

In 1949, the soon-to-be graduate became a summer intern at 50,000-watt CBS affiliate

 
WTOP Washington: amazingly, the only station to reply among the 125 Scully wrote. He became a news, weather, and sports substitute for, among others, Arch McDonald, Voice of the Washington Senators: “First in War, First in Peace, and Last in the American League.”

           

Since 1939, Barber had aired the Dodgers. A decade later, the also-CBS Radio Sports

director interviewed the intern. That fall, needing a sportscaster, Red phoned WTOP for references, then called Vin’s home. Barber got Scully’s mother, who that night greeted Vin at the door.

           

“You’ll never guess who called today,” Bridget said, red-haired and breathless. “It’s such a great thing that he called here, such a busy man, it’s so exciting.  He wants you to call him.”

           

“Who was it?” Scully asked.

           

“Red Skelton,” Mom said of the iconic comic.

           

The last laugh was not on Vin. Next day Barber gave him his first assignment: Boston University v. Maryland college football at Boston’s Fenway Park. Expecting a covered booth, Scully broadcast from the roof: no press box, in freezing weather, never whispering a complaint.

           

Barber was impressed: much later, calling Vin “the son I never had.” That winter, Ernie Harwell left the Dodgers for the hated Giants. Red chose Scully to succeed him. Six decades later, Harwell, laughing, terms it “my greatest contribution to baseball.”

 

Throwing Darts in the Fog

 

How did Vin become what Jim Murray called “The Fordham Thrush with a .400 larynx”?  In Pull Up a Chair, I discuss what makes Scully, Scully: elusive, since defining art can rival throwing darts in the fog.

           

His goods tie credibility, proportion, knowledge, discipline, grasp of everyday hope and fear, and melodic Irish tenor less Pavarotti than Perry Como. The package has graced a nonpareil 25 World Series, 18 no-hitters, more games than anyone in broadcast history, 1979-97 CBS Radio, and 1983-89 NBC Television Game of the Week.

           

Vin has made the Hollywood Walk of Fame, won a lifetime Emmy Award, entered every major radio/TV Hall of Fame, and been voted “the most memorable personality in L.A. Dodgers history”: connecting tissue between the public and its game. Churchill called “words you use as ammunition.” Scully uses them against temptation to turn the dial.

           

Retrieve Vin’s “twilight’s little footsteps of sunshine.”  Recall “He catches the gingerly, like a baby chick falling from the tree.” One day a weak dribbler-turned infield hit prompted Eugene O’Neill’s “A humble thing, but thine own.” Another, a mutton-chopped player entered the game. “What ho! What ho!” said Vin, inspired. “What men are these, who wear their sideburns like parentheses?”

Of St. Louis: “It was so hot today the moon got sunburned.”  Tom Glavine: “He pitches like a tailor: a little off here, a little off there, and you’re done.” A giveaway day at Dodger Stadium: “There’s something redundant about giving noisemakers under 14 years of age.” Rennie Stennett, giving out cigars, predicting his wife would have a boy. Said Scully of the girl: “[Stennett] only missed by one.”

 

Perhaps Scully never went deeper than May 7, 1959.  In 1957, the Dodgers had left Brooklyn for Los Angeles. That winter catcher Roy Campanella was crippled in a crash. Now baseball’s then-largest crowd, 93,103 at Memorial Coliseum, feted Campy before an exhibition.  Scully spoke magically, climbing a peak of place and mood.

           

“The lights are going out in this final tribute to Roy Campanella, and everyone at the ballpark … are asked in silent tribute to light a match,” he said. “The lights are now starting to come out, like thousands and thousands of fireflies, starting in center field, glittering around to left, and slowly the entire ballpark.” Then: “A sea of lights at the Coliseum.”

           

L.A. sees Vin’s lights nightly. Others see them on satellite radio, Scully navigating dead air by using language as an oar. Once Andre Dawson made the disabled list. “He’s day to day,” Vin said. Pause. “Then, aren’t we all?” His career is now year-to-year, still splicing a listener and the game.

 

Safe Harbor

 

Scully would have made a great politician, yet hated politics: too intrusive, too public, too little respect for silence. In 1955, Flatbush USA won its only world title. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world,” Vin said, simply. That winter people asked how he remained so calm. “If I’d said another word at that very instant, I’d have broken down and cried.” Since then, his ammunition has often included silence.

 

1974: On a rainy night in Georgia, Henry Aaron’s 715^th homer crossed a most Ruthian line. Vin called the drive, moved to the back of the booth, poured a glass of water, and hushed for half-a-minute. Then: “A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol!”

           

Segue to 1986. Bill Buckner’s immemorial error froze time – and me, as a Red Sox fan. “Here comes Knight!” Vin said. “And the Mets win it!” Scully’s usually singsong voice rocked, throbbed, alight with feel.  He then quieted for an entire minute.

           

1988: Kirk Gibson heroically went deep. Sixty-seven seconds later: “in a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened”: still the 8-year-old, under the radio, letting the crowd hold sway.

           

It seems impossible that Scully will one day retire. Yet the Scully School can live:  vivid is good, personal better, and making the complex simple best. In today’s 24/7 attention span-challenged age, most Voices fall to meet their audience. Scully asks his to rise.

On October 26, 1991, I worked all day on a Bush 41 address. At 10 P.M., I left the White House, found my car on the Ellipse, and turned to CBS Radio’s Game Six coverage of the 88^th World Series.

           

At one point, a Minnesota Twins runner reached second base. Out of the blue, I heard Scully reference Broadway’s Death of a Salesman: its “tiny ship” – the runner at second base – seeking “safe harbor” – home plate. I almost drove off Pennsylvania Avenue. Only Scully could fuse baseball and Arthur Miller: literature in a highlight age.

           

Fast-forward to 2025. A grandchild will savor some announcer. Smiling, we’ll recall Scully: in memory, our safe harbor. From baseball, Vin seldom lets us wander far away.