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CloseLinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink ANAHEIM, Calif. — The Yankees won the World Series in 1936, when Vin Scully became a baseball fan. Yet Scully, born in the Bronx, did not root for the winning team. He felt sorry for the losers.
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Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett, his broadcast partner, in 1965.
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Vin Scully has been calling Dodgers games since 1950 and will be in the booth on Friday when the Yankees visit.
“What happened was, I was 9 years old, and I was walking home from my grammar school in Washington Heights, and there was a Chinese laundry,” Scully recalled this week, in the Dodgers’ broadcast booth before a game.
“And the Chinese laundryman had the line score on a piece of paper on the window of the laundry. I don’t know what number game it was, but the Yankees beat the Giants and they scored in double figures. I mean, they just crushed them. And here is this 9-year-old, knowing nothing, and visibly, I can see it, I stopped and looked at the line score and my first thought was, ‘Oh, those poor Giants.’ And that’s why I became a Giant fan.”
The Yankees walloped the Giants twice that autumn — by 18-4 in Game 2, and by 13-5 in the Game 6 clincher. Soon enough, Scully no longer needed a laundryman’s line score to see the Yankees win the World Series. As the voice of the Dodgers since 1950, he has covered his share.
Scully, 82, will be in the booth at Dodger Stadium Friday when the Yankees visit for the first time in six years. Scully calls all nine innings of every Dodgers television game at home and in Western division parks. His first three innings are simulcast on the radio.
The Yankees have not played the Dodgers in October since 1981, the most recent of the teams’ 11 World Series meetings. The Dodgers clinched that championship in the Bronx, but the team flew home immediately. Scully and his wife stayed behind, retreating to the Carlyle, where they were staying and where George Steinbrenner had a suite.
“I went into the bar and I said to the bartender, ‘Could I buy a bottle of Champagne?’ ” Scully said. “So the bartender, looking around, said, ‘Yeah, I’d be happy to do it, as long as Mr. Steinbrenner doesn’t see me helping you celebrate.’ So we went up and ordered potato chips and a glass of Champagne. That was our celebration.”
There had been much more fanfare the last time the Dodgers triumphed at Yankee Stadium. That was in 1955, when Scully said the words Brooklyn fans had never heard before, and would never hear again: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.”
Walter O’Malley, the owner, took the Dodgers’ executives and Scully to the Lexington Hotel, where they rested before the victory party at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn. Scully picked up his date — Joan Ganz, who would one day create “Sesame Street” — for an unforgettable drive.
“In Manhattan, it was the fall and football was in the air, two hours after the baseball game,” Scully said. “We drove through the tunnel — I don’t know if we went through the Lincoln or the Battery tunnel — and it was like V-J Day and V-E Day all rolled into one in Brooklyn. They were dancing in the streets. It was just one monumental block party.”
Scully continued: “And when we got near the Bossert hotel, the streets were lined with people. They had sawhorses to restrain them — although the people were very good, they weren’t about to do anything — but they took our cars about a block from the hotel, and we had to walk down the street into the hotel, like you were in a parade, with people cheering. We walked down the street together into the Bossert hotel where all hell was breaking loose, and that was amazing.”
The next fall, back at Yankee Stadium, Scully called the last four innings of Don Larsen’s perfect game against the Dodgers. Mel Allen had called the first five, counting Larsen’s consecutive outs but never mentioning that a perfect game was in progress.
Scully followed Allen’s lead, but he has never seen the full broadcast. He peeked in when MLB Network showed it in 2009, but quickly changed the channel.
“I was so bored with the way I thought that I was doing it, I went right back to the football,” Scully said. “Because it was, you know, ‘Foul ball, one ball, one strike.’ It was awful. I thought, whoa! So I went back to the football game, and I’ve never listened to it again.”
Other calls have been more satisfying. Scully proclaimed: “We go to Chicago!” when the Dodgers clinched their first pennant in Los Angeles, in 1959, and that became a battle cry for fans. A generation later, on NBC in 1986, he called a “little roller up along first” that still inspires Mets fans.
Scully does not know how much longer he will work. He thinks a lot about his wife, Sandra, and the loneliness she must feel on game days. Ideally, he said, he might scale back his schedule, if the Dodgers would allow.
“But the problem is that I do love my job,” Scully said. “Can I give it up? I don’t know.”
Baseball would go on without Scully, as it has without Harry Kalas and Ernie Harwell, but it would never be the same. His sense of wonder, bred in the Polo Grounds bleachers watching Mel Ott after school, has never left. Vin Scully is forever young.
“I guess,” he said, “my thermometer for my baseball fever is still a goose bump.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 25, 2010, on page B9 of the New York edition.
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