None better than Scully on the call

As any true fan of the sport might tell you, baseball is a sport better heard than seen.

Television adopted baseball to a large degree in the 1950s, thus dooming the minor leagues to an ignominious fate and burying the Negro leagues. Trying to make baseball a three-dimensional sport, the networks did all right with height and width but whiffed on depth.

Baseball is meant for listening on a hot summer night in one’s living room or porch swing. The nuances are so ingrained in many Americans that one can imagine, if not actually see, infielders shift to the right side and visualize a No. 8 hitter trying to lay down a bunt with the pitcher on deck. As when Babe Ruth played the game, it’s nine man to a side (the designated-hitter rule be hanged) and three strikes you’re out.

Sometimes, a master craftsman will paint word pictures of baseball on radio or TV. In my time, no one did it better than Vin Scully, for 67 years the voice of the Los Angeles (former Brooklyn) Dodgers. Six years after calling his last Dodger broadcast, Scully signed off from life this past week at age 94.

He began in Brooklyn alongside the legendary Red Barber, who instructed Scully to equip himself with an hourglass as a reminder to give the score often. So many young announcers stumble on this simple step or bore listeners with endless stats (WHIP and WAR), dulling the impact of what they say.

Scully came up during the National League club’s last eight years in Brooklyn, describing the deeds of such immortals as Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Gil Hodges. Relocating to Los Angeles, where the major-league game had not existed, he basically taught Socal listeners how it was played. Scully found eager listeners both with Manhattan cab drivers and Malibu beachgoers

“He was as popular as any Dodger player,” team executive Earvin “Magic” Johnson said in tribute. Scully watched the Dodgers reinvent themselves from the boys of summer, heavy on power, to a team rooted in winning baseball, almost unbeatable in a low-scoring game. Maury Wills supplied the speed (104 stolen bases in his 1962 NL MVP season), gigantic Frank Howard the pop (especially in the early 1960s) and Don Drysdale the high heat to someone crowding the plate.

The undisputed star was a left-hander from Brooklyn who still hasn’t pitched a game in the minor leagues. Sandy Koufax scratched himself from a World Series start because it fell on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. It made national headlines.

Scully called four Koufax no-hitters, one each from 1962-65, with the last such gem coming close to an immaculate contest. On a September night in LA, Koufax retired all 27 batters he faced, a perfect game, the game’s only hit struck by Dodger Lou Johnson. Final, Chicago 0-0-0. Los Angeles 1-10: Don’t look for that again any time soon.

That Dodger team won a World Series Game 7 in Minnesota, Koufax going the route, 2-0, on two days’ rest without much help from his curveball, a weapon so devastating that slugger Willie Stargell said hitting it was “like trying to drink coffee with a fork.” Retiring prematurely, freshly turned 30, because of an arthritic left elbow, Koufax carried the Dodgers to another Series before a four-game sweep by Frank and Brooks Robinson and the Orioles, LA not scoring in the last three games.

Scully, the Renoir of broadcasters, described masterpieces composed by the sport’s Michelangelo, many fit for framing in baseball’s Louvre.

Scully could be a hard act for anyone else in the booth but

what a role model. Jerry Doggett and Ross Porter were quite capable in the middle innings of Dodger games though Salieris to Scully’s Mozart.

Hey, I tuned in to the NBC show “Occasional Wife,” starring Michael Callan, just to hear Scully’s uncredited narration.

Baseball has not had two greater voices in the same booth than Scully and Joe Gargagiola. Their finest hour came in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, Dodgers vs. Athletics, in which a limping Kirk Gibson came up with two outs and the Dodgers down a run. Dennis Eckersley left a backdoor slider over the plate far enough for Gibson to send it into the sky to right field.

Not expected to play, Gibson took swings in the dugout before pinch-hitting with a man on. Scully, at his best, called it thusly: “And look who’s coming up.” They only wondered if Kirk could get around the bases with the run that made it 5-4.

Scully was behind the NBC microphone for Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, Red Sox vs. Mets, when the visiting team again could not get the final out at Shea Stadium, on which a New England sports writer later called “the Grassy Knoll of Boston sports,” Mookie Wilson rolled one up the first-base line, through Bill Buckner’s legs, with two out in the 10th. “Here comes (Ray) Knight from third,” Scully said, “and the Mets win it.”

From the game’s first pitch, a Scully broadcast could be something to treasure. “Pull up a chair,” he might say after the first half-inning, “we’re just getting started.” In Scully’s hands, the listener never wanted to change channels or for the game to end.