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Vin Scully, the best and perhaps most beloved baseball broadcaster there has ever been, died Tuesday night at age 94.
The tributes poured out immediately, heartfelt and in abundance, from anyone who was fortunate enough to hear him narrate ballgames through the generations with his inimitable style of eloquent, lilting wonderment.
For those of us who still believe, sometimes against all common sense, in the romanticism and connective powers of baseball, this one hurts.
The story of baseball cannot be told without Vin Scully. And nobody ever told the story of baseball better than Vin Scully.
Let’s consider that first statement for a moment before we linger on the second.
As a national voice for decades on CBS and then NBC, Scully called some of the most memorable moments in World Series history, including the Mets’ rally to the beat the Red Sox in Game 6 in 1986, and hobbling Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit home run to win Game 1 for the Dodgers over the Athletics in ‘88.
Scully called myriad other sports too, of course — his call of “The Catch” in the 1981 NFC Championship game between the 49ers and Cowboys is a gem in its own right — but never have a broadcaster and a sport been a more copacetic fit than Scully and baseball.
For all of the famous, flawless big-moment calls, Scully’s enduring legacy will be the 67 seasons he spent in the Dodgers booth from 1950-2016, the longest tenure of any broadcaster with one team in professional sports history.
Sixty-seven years. Pause to consider what he witnessed, what he told us about, and the institutional knowledge he gathered in that time, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who drew a longer through-line through baseball history.
His first professional assignment, a football game between Boston University and Maryland in 1949, took place at Fenway Park, a sign if there ever was one that the baseball booth was where he belonged.
