When Derek Jeter retired two years ago, it was the “end of an era” in baseball. David Ortiz will call it quits whenever the Red Sox finish their season and you’ll hear those same four words used. It’s the same when Peyton Manning or Tom Brady retires or when a league changes television networks (like when Fox grabbed the NFC from CBS in the mid-’90s), its playoff format or major rules.
But in all those cases, eras aren’t ending. A page is being turned or, sometimes, maybe a new chapter is beginning. There might never be another Roger Federer or Serena Williams but tennis won’t cease to exit without them. (Witness golf and Tiger Woods.) The NFL was great on CBS and still great on Fox. Even though we think things won’t be the same, the new reality is barely recognizable from the old one. The perceived ending of eras are most often erroneous and overrated.
That being said, Vin Scully retiring is the end of an era baseball, and sport, that will never seen again. We’ll never see anything like it again. The great Dodgers play-by-play man, who started with the team in Brooklyn, followed them to Los Angeles and became a national icon in calling some of the great moments in sports history but never left his trusty perch behind home plate at Dodger Stadium will call his final game Sunday, 67 years and almost 100,000 innings after his first. How long has he been around? Scully made it into the broadcasting hall of fame 35 year ago. The general manager in his first season behind the mic was Branch Rickey, the man who integrated baseball. Rickey was born in 1881. He called games involving players who’d faced Babe Ruth.
There have been hundreds of thousands of words written about Scully over the past month, waxing rhapsodic about his folksy, yet literary, descriptions of baseball. His brilliance was in how easy he made it all seem despite the fact baseball is the trickiest of sports to call, with the endless pauses in between each pitch, the repetitive nature of the game and, in some situations, the mundaneness of a meaningless August game with the Dodgers far out of first place. The way Scully could weave a story around calling the game (1-2 pitch,” outside) is what it must have been like to watch Picasso apply his brush to canvas. And to think he did it, most of the time, all by himself. Announcing baseball alone is like playing tennis doubles by yourself. It can’t be done.
But Scully’s retirement isn’t just about losing a master wordsmith who had a poetic way of describing the national pastime, a story for every occasion and the buttery voice that was so soothing it could put you to sleep. (How many times did someone nod off at night to the voice of Vin Scully?) Scully was the last remaining link with the past – when baseball truly was that national pastime, the only daily game in town, while football was an interloper and the World Series was still the biggest show in sports. Even into Scully’s 25th season, the World Series was vastly more popular than the Super Bowl. In 1975, Game 6 of the World Series – Carlton Fisk’s home run – was watched by 75 million people. The Super Bowl drew 56 million earlier that year.
In the days of Scully and his contemporaries such as Ernie Harwell, Jack Buck, Harry Caray and Mel Allen, announcing baseball on the radio was the biggest job in sports media. Television was in its infancy and only the biggest games were broadcast. Even when TV became more prevalent, radio was still the preferred medium. (Only people of a certain era will remember turning down the volume on the TV to play the radio broadcast instead: it’s been made impossible now by DVR and tape delay – thanks, Janet Jackson.)
Over time, radio faded for the same reason network television ratings are a fraction of what the used to be (with football being immune to the drops). There are too many options. In the car you used to have a few crackly AM stations and then, later, some FM. It used to be Scully or nothing in southern California. Now you have, iPod/iPhone music, SiriusXM, Pandora, Spotify and podcasts, among many other. And on TV it’s the same, making must-watch Dodgers games into a fifth- or sixth-option on a summer night.
Scully adapted. But aside from the fact that his 67-year reign won’t be duplicated for practical reasons, it’d be impossible for logistical ones too.
There’s more opportunity now that the three-network days with one baseball game a week, a couple of NFL games, a national college football and Notre Dame game plus some horse racing and golf are a thing of the past. A dozen different networks air baseball, football, basketball, college games and countless other sports and the announcers for these sports are plucked early from local radio and television broadcasts. Young announcers who show promise are grabbed by national networks and get to broadcast to millions instead of a couple thousand on a weak AM feed.
Scully dabbled with the networks, of course, but it wasn’t until 25 years into his career. He called NFL games for CBS for eight seasons (“The Catch” was his last call), did The Masters and other golf events and later became the voice of NBC’s baseball Game of the Week (he called both the Bill Bucker and Kirk Gibson plays) until CBS bought MLB rights in 1989. He’d have the occasional national TV gig after that but would pretty much be solely seen in Southern California from then on. (He did call the World Series on radio for most of the 1990s.)
Today, a talent such as Scully would have been called to “the bigs” a few years into his Dodgers career. While calling local baseball games is still a great job to aspire to and there are plenty of civic icons who still do it (Bob Uecker, Marty Brennaman and Jon Miller come to mind), those jobs are now stepping stones when they used to be the summit.
The three sports with the most famous local announcers – baseball and college football/basketball – have become so regionalized that it’s unlikely you can name more than one or two announcers (aside from the three mentioned above) outside your particular market.
The truth is, unless you watch the Dodgers game or a devotee to MLB.com, you haven’t heard Scully call a game in decades. If you’re of the older set, you’re lamenting the loss of something you haven’t had in 25 years. And if you were born after 1980, you’re lamenting the loss of an era you never lived – like someone who grieved the retirement of David Letterman even though they hadn’t watched his show in years.
If you lived in Southern California, of course, Vin Scully meant something else entirely. He was with your narrator through life – the voice you heard when you were a youngster riding in the backseat of your parents’ car, the guy who was always in the background of your summer nights as a teenager, when you were going on dates and getting up to no good with your friends, the guy you eventually would introduce your kids to, the same way your mom or dad had done to you. And even though you might not have listened to the radio or watched Dodgers games as much, there was something comforting knowing Scully was there, doing what he’d done since the Truman administration.
Only a 75-year-old can remember a time when Vin Scully wasn’t calling Dodgers games. Someone who debuted this baseball season would have to stay with the team until 2083 to match that. It’ll never happen again – or even be approached.
The end of an era? Yes. But Vin Scully wasn’t the voice of a generation, he was the voice of two or three.
