We knew Vin Scully wasn’t going to last forever. It only seemed like he could. Even in retirement, years after its last broadcast in 2016, its presence remained omnipresent and ethereal, like the ocean and the air. “There are two words to describe Vin: Babe Ruth,” said Charley Steiner, the Dodgers’ radio play-by-play man since 2005 after moving west from the Yankees’ bullpen (2002-04). “The best to ever do it. Babe Ruth will always be defined as baseball. Vin will always be remembered as the voice of baseball.” The wild ride that was Tuesday’s major league trading deadline suddenly and abruptly gave way to a gravity in the calm that night when the Dodgers announced that Scully had died at 94. The life cycle of baseball, distilled in one day: new beginnings and sad endings. Scully had been in declining health for the last few months and those who knew him well were preparing for the phone call. But when it came, it was still a punch in the gut. “It doesn’t make it any easier, because we lost a friend,” said Rick Monday, the Dodgers’ former outfielder and longtime broadcaster. “Whether we actually met Vin Scully or not, he was our friend. Like best friends, he was full of wonder, joy, humility and surprises. “When I was in college, I wrote for the Times, so you probably saw my byline,” Scully said eagerly to begin an interview with The New York Times earlier this summer for a story about Gil Hodges, back in his college days. Fordham. it was just around a recent corner. “It says, ‘Special Correspondent for the Times’. I was under an assumed name. Anyway, I just wanted you to know my literary background.” Another time, late at night after an interleague game at Angel Stadium early in the 2013 season, some members of the news media were waiting for an elevator to head home for the night when Scully escorted them down. He wore a brace on his left arm and wrist, the result of a bout with tendinitis. “I was telling someone earlier that I should just tell people that I’ve been interested in the hawk and that I’m waiting for the bird,” he said, grinning broadly. “That would make a better story, wouldn’t it?” His instincts were perfect and his joy constant. “He was so well read,” Monday said. “It also has the English language. Listening to Vin made you feel like you had to go back to school right away. But he never spoke to anyone, ever. He was amazing.” In one of his last public acts, Scully wrote a letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame Era Committee in support of Hodges’ nomination for the Hall of Fame—a letter said to be highly influential. But the ever-humble Scully refused to believe he had enough clout to sway voters and, what’s more, he didn’t want any credit. “Even when I wrote it, I had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t be publicized to the point where I’m suddenly trying to get in the same spotlight because I didn’t want that at all,” Scully said this summer. “Yes, I wrote the letter, and it was true as far as I know in every respect. But I don’t want to dwell on that at all. “I’m extremely sensitive now that I’m retired. I just don’t want to do anything where I might look out of place.” But Scully’s “part” was everywhere, a friend welcomed by all, starting with his warm invitation at the beginning of each show to “pull up a chair.” And for nearly seven decades, from the mansions of Bel Air to the blue-collar neighborhoods around the Southland, on behalf of the Dodgers, he created an incredible extended family. Monday grew up in Santa Monica, California, with a single mother who fell in love with the Dodgers when they moved west in 1958. Whenever they were in the car when the Dodgers played, Monday recalls, Scully was their companion. “His voice was like a gentle hand placed on our shoulder, saying, ‘Hey, things are going to be okay. Whatever happens in the world, whatever happens in your life, for these next three hours, I got you,” Monday said. “That’s the feeling we had.” Millions of others experienced similar feelings during those 67 years as Iron Man. “I was mesmerized by this game and I was even more mesmerized by Vin’s voice and the way he presented the game,” Monday said. “His description of the uniforms, the field, how fast a guy was running, how hard a ball was hit, a dive that was made. When Vin made a game, it wasn’t just the games of the game, it was the specter of the game.” Monday was the No. 1 overall draft pick in baseball’s first amateur draft in 1965 by the Athletics, who traded him to the Chicago Cubs before the 1972 season. “So the Dodgers finally go to Chicago and my mom can watch the game on TV,” she said Monday. “It’s my seventh year in the majors and my mom heard Vin Scully call my name. I said, “Mom, you didn’t even know I was in the big leagues until Vin mentioned my name.” She laughed. That made it official.” The Los Angeles Times magazine in 1998 named Scully the most trusted man in Los Angeles. Eight years before that, the late, legendary Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray argued that Scully was the most important Dodger of all time. Little has changed since then. “Vincent Edward Scully meant as much or more to the Dodgers than any .300 hitter they ever signed, any 20-game hitter they ever pitched,” Murray wrote in a column published in August 1990. “True, he didn’t limp The original joke and hit the home run that turned a season into a miracle – but he knew what to do with it so it would reverberate through the ages.” When Kirk Gibson crushed that home run against Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley to set the tone for the Dodgers’ upset of Oakland in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, Scully exclaimed, “In a year that was so improbable, the impossible happened !” For one minute and eight seconds, he remained silent, allowing the roaring Dodger Stadium crowd to fill the television speakers. The reverberations continue to this day. The sense of time, story and moment was impeccable, no matter the occasion. “He wasn’t just an announcer,” Steiner said. “He wasn’t just a baseball figure. He was a father figure, he was harmless, he was a conscience, he was all we hoped was right with the world. And many times it was.” Steiner continued: “Los Angeles is a city of stars. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks. I’ve long felt that Vin was the biggest star of all because of his longevity. No one ever did it better, and no one ever said it stinks. He was comforting, parental, angelic. He had a brilliant, crystal clear mind.” After Tuesday night’s Dodgers-Giants game, Monday said he was in his San Francisco hotel room until 5 a.m., going over the memories in his mind, alternately smiling and tearing up. When he and his wife travel somewhere, he said, his wife often jokes that the place wasn’t as good as the brochure. “Vin Scully was better than the brochure,” Monday said. He recalled Scully’s last broadcast at Dodger Stadium in 2016, when the icon beautifully roused the sellout crowd by singing “Wind Beneath My Wings” when the game ended. Assistant Charlie Culberson had broken out a storybook leaving the house moments earlier. What’s easy to forget is that it wasn’t Scully’s last broadcast, the Dodgers ending that season with three games in San Francisco. There, Culberson had his now famous bat with him. When he wasn’t sure what to do with it, Monday suggested that Scully sign it. Culberson was shy, Monday asked, and Scully said she would be “honored” to sign it. Monday accompanied Culberson upstairs to the San Francisco press box where they met Scully. “It was unbelievable,” Monday said. “It was like two kids in a park examining this magic wand of a bat. Vinnie signed it and they were about to say goodbye when he walked into the booth, but the man Vinnie always said was the best player he ever saw — Willie Mays. “Charlie and Vinny were already in tears, then Willie walks in and it was like one of those time capsule moments. “And then we get word in the third or fourth inning here last night, 60 feet from where this happened.”
