(Young Vin Scully in Brooklyn)
We send along our birthday greetings to Hall of Fame Baseball announcer, Vin Scully, who celebrates his 81st birthday today, with fifty-eight (58) years behind the mike for the Dodgers. His career as the Dodgers announcer started in 1950. Eight seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers, fifty with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He is as reliable as the seasons, a touchstone of life, as time goes by.
One of my favorite Vin Scully quotes underscores baseball’s connection to life:
“Andre Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day (pause). Aren’t we all?”
Click here to listen to Vin’s famous call
of the last inning of Sandy Koufax’s first no-hitter on June 30, 1962
From his National Baseball Hall of Fame biography:
Scully’s remarkable tenure as the “Voice of the Dodgers” began in 1950 when he joined Red Barber as a member of the Brooklyn club’s radio team. Scully followed the Dodgers’ move west in 1958. As Scully recalled: “Red was my teacher … and my father. I don’t know—I might have been the son he never had. It wasn’t so much that he taught me how to broadcast. It was an attitude. Get to the park early. Do your homework. Be prepared. Be accurate. He was a stickler for that. He cared. He was very much a taskmaster, or I might have developed bad habits.”
Many adjectives have been used to describe Scully and his style since his declaration to a teacher at the age of eight of his ambition to become a sports announcer: entertaining, precise, proficient, charming, friendly, outgoing, smooth, relaxed, warm, knowledgeable, intelligent, literate, concise, well-prepared, colorful. Los Angeles Times columnist and J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner Jim Murray once called him “the Fordham Thrush with the .400 larynx.”
Scully has covered many of baseball’s most thrilling moments, including Sandy Koufax’s four no-hitters, Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, Maury Wills’s 104 stolen bases, Don Drysdale’s and Orel Hershiser’s scoreless inning streaks, and Kirk Gibson’s dramatic home run in Game One of the 1988 World Series.
For a bit more on his illustrious career, click here.
(He is an honorary member of the Ballparkradio broadcast crew)
Speaking of radio broadcasts, Ballparkradio will be on the air again in Orlando – 2009 being our sixth consecutive year of bringing you live AAU broadcasts. Back for his third year, and heading things up will be broadcaster Kyle Smith, now a fixture on the ISC II broadcasts during the summer, and featured broadcaster at this past summer’s ISF Jr. Men’s World Championships from Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. Keep an eye out for the Ballparkradio schedule of broadcasts for the 2009, which will be the largest field of teams ever, at forty !
(click logo to visit Ballparkradio.com website)
Here’s a short clip of Kyle Smith, with yours truly, broadcasting at the 2008 ISF Jr. World Championships in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. Remember you can view in high quality by clicking the little YouTube logo in the lower right, after you start playing this video.