The Right Call

Vincent Edward Scully has been the voice of the Dodgers for 64 years, 55 of them in Los Angeles. During that time, he has been recognized time and again as the greatest sportscaster of all time.

He is the man who brought joy to Mudville, the icon whose popularity has crossed generational, economic and racial lines.

Hyperbole? Hardly. He received the Ford Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982 and was honored with a Life Achievement Emmy Award for sportscasting and induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.

The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association has named Scully as National Sportscaster of the Year three times (1965, 1978, 1982) and California Sportscaster of the Year 29 times, and inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1991. He was the 1992 Hall of Fame inductee of the American Sportscasters Association, which also named him Sportscaster of the Century (2000) and top sportscaster of all time on its Top 50 list (2009).

And by the way, he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

But there’s been one significant honor that eluded him. Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade.

It was, in the parlance of baseball, a bad call.

That glaring mistake was corrected Thursday with the announcement that Scully will serve as Grand Marshal on New Year’s Day.

Now, a wrong has been righted. The sun shines brightly on the new mown field. And we celebrate. Here’s why:

When I think of a half-century of Dodger baseball, there is one constant that remains as all the seasons and players begin to blend together in memory.

That is Vin Scully.

Back in the days before every game was televised, Scully was the Dodgers.

His voice on the radio meant spring was here. When Scully called the Dodgers, it was time to get the lawn furniture out, fix a cool drink and listen to the drama unfold as only a master storyteller could describe it.

It is Scully who said, “He (Bob Gibson) pitches as though he’s double-parked.”

It is Scully who described pitcher Tom Glavine as being “like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.”

It is Scully who called Stan Musial “good enough to take your breath away.”

It is Scully who said, “It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timer’s game.”

It is Scully, who, in an eloquent Irish tenor, can call a baseball game and make it sound like a reading of Emerson or Whitman.

Years ago, when I did get to a game at the Coliseum or Dodger Stadium, it was Scully’s voice that dominated the scene, broadcast over a thousand portable radios clutched by fans throughout the park.

It was as though, even if you saw the action with your own eyes, you needed Scully to validate it before you believed it.

Vin once described his love with broadcasting this way: “I would come home to listen to a football game — there weren’t other sports on — and I would get a pillow and I would crawl under the radio, so that the loudspeaker and the roar of the crowd would wash all over me, and I would just get goose bumps like you can’t believe. And I knew that of all the things in this world that I wanted, I wanted to be that fella saying, whatever, home run, or touchdown. It just really got to me.”

Vin is 85 now, still getting and giving goose bumps. Maybe he should announce the football game at the conclusion of the Rose Parade. After all, as the Irish like to say, “the older the fiddle, the sweeter the tune.”

Instead, let’s give him the day off and let him enjoy the accolades.

And get busy on erecting his statue at the entrance to Dodger Stadium.