Scully continues to paint scene at 79
LOS ANGELES – The tribute was composed in the 28 seconds it took Henry Aaron to round the bases and the roar to finally subside. Listen to it today, and it will still make the hair on your arms stand up straight.
Vin Scully wasn’t working from notes. He had nothing prepared because, well, that might ruin the magic of the moment.
He let the crowd in Atlanta tell part of the story. Then he spoke from his heart about the magnitude of it all.
“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world,” Scully told Dodgers fans back home in Los Angeles. “A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it’s a great moment for all of us and particularly for Henry Aaron, who is met at home plate not only by every member of the Braves but by his father and mother.”
Until now, Scully thought most people had forgotten about it. At the age of 79, he still lives in the day-to-day world of play-by-play, where what you say in the first inning is history by the first pitch of the second.
“Everything we do is skywriting,” Scully said. “It’s put up in the wind and it blows away.”
The wind couldn’t scatter this call far enough. Through the beauty of the Internet, it lives on for anyone savvy enough to use a Web browser.
He’s had other magical calls. Dodgers fans would argue that it’s magic every time he sits in front of a microphone and welcomes them to a beautiful night at Dodger Stadium.
Scully was doing just that Wednesday night, in his open-air booth two levels above home plate. Cup of coffee in hand, tie carefully knotted and not a hair out of place, he settled comfortably into a seat he has occupied for almost every home game since the stadium opened 45 years ago.
The hated Giants were in town, usually a series that Scully relishes for both the rivalry and the history that goes back to when he was broadcasting for the Dodgers in Brooklyn and the Giants were playing across town at the Polo Grounds.
But this night was different. This series was different.
Barry Bonds came to town with a chance to tie or break Aaron’s home run mark. If he did, Scully would be making the call, 33 years after he did the same for Hammerin’ Hank.
He wasn’t looking forward to it, but not for the reasons you might think.
“It’s nothing personal, but I’d just as soon have the Aaron one and not a second one,” Scully said. “The Aaron moment was so precious that if I got to do another call it wouldn’t be the same. It would just be the second one.”
The night before, 56,000 fans jammed the stadium to watch the spectacle, many with portable radios to listen to Scully’s broadcast. It’s a tradition at Dodger Stadium, where most nights you hear snippets of Scully’s smooth voice as you walk through the park.
He is as much Dodgers baseball as Sandy Koufax, even more a part of the fabric of the team than Tommy Lasorda. He’s the reason Dodgers fans can arrive late and leave early, confident he will paint the picture for them while they listen to their car radios.
He’s a modest man who still seems surprised when people tell him that, as kids, they’d fall asleep listening to him on the transistors they would sneak under the covers.The game was now just a couple of hours away, and the first fans were coming into the park. Bonds was batting cleanup, and Scully had some work to do to make sure he had the right facts and stories.
He had nothing prepared for Bonds, though, just as he didn’t rehearse Aaron’s historic home run or Kirk Gibson’s ninth-inning homer in the 1988 World Series. It just wouldn’t seem right.