Vin Scully: The voice, the heart, and the light.
MLB writer Tim Brown reflects on the career of legendary broadcaster Vin Scully, who called 67 seasons of Dodgers baseball.
Video Transcript
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TIM BROWN: It will be said the Dodgers lost their voice, were it only that. Vin Scully was their heart, their soul, their conscience. When they were down, he sang. When they were bad, he sighed. When they were good, he helped the other guy up.
VIN SCULLY: One strike away. Sandy into his windup. Here's the pitch. Swung on and missed. The perfect game.
TIM BROWN: He was indeed the soundtrack for going on 70 summers in Brooklyn and in Los Angeles. In those towns, he was more than what the game sounded like. He was what the game felt like, how it grazed our fingertips and brushed our cheeks on an August evening. If first base were an oak tree, second base a welcome mat, and third base our buddy's wadded t-shirt.
VIN SCULLY: Little roller up along first. Behind the back. It gets through Buckner. Here comes nine and the Mets win it.
TIM BROWN: The eulogies will be romantic because Vin Scully drew us into the romance with the game, with the men who played it. He made it fun and them human. See, this was never about Vin Scully, not when he was a young man learning at the elbow of Red Barber in the early '50s, not when he became the voice of the Boys of Summer, and certainly not when years later he became their honorable patriarch.
VIN SCULLY: Fastball. It's a high five into deep left center field. Buckner goes back to the fence. It is gone.
TIM BROWN: The Dodgers were going to be OK so long as Vin leaned into his microphone and gathered his audience. Hi, everybody, he'd say. Followed by through hours of wisdom, and laughs, and occasionally a tear. It was baseball the way he saw it, which became baseball the way we saw it. He was the narrator with a twinkle in his eye who became our friend. He never threw a pitch for the Dodgers, never swung a bat. The Dodgers, however, won't ever be the same without him.
VIN SCULLY: High flying ball into right field. She is gone.
TIM BROWN: Neither will the game. When he agreed to return for his 67th season, Scully quoted the poet Dylan Thomas. "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying light." He smiled. I guess, he said, in a way that's what I'm doing. I'm raging against the dying of my career, which has to be around the corner now. But at least for the God given time that I have left, I'll be raging. So now, we can only say farewell and to thank him for keeping our world lit.
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