For over six decades, Vin Scully was what baseball sounded like
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where JR and I help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. You’re all learning English and part of learning a language is learning the culture where the language is spoken. And this is one of those days where you’ll learn a little something about American culture that I bet you didn’t know.
Vin Scully was a baseball broadcaster for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was on TV and the radio for 67 years; he retired in 2016. But he died recently and so today we’ll talk about Vin Scully’s life’s work —broadcasting baseball on the radio. In the process , you’ll hopefully learn a little something about our culture that’s not quite as well-known outside our borders.
By the way, this is lesson number 496, and JR has uploaded the full lesson content to PlainEnglish.com/496. We have an English expression to talk about today, too. You’ll hear that in the second half of today’s lesson.
Vin Scully was the voice of the Dodgers for 67 years
To understand why Vin Scully was such an icon in American culture, it helps to understand a little more about baseball and the radio. Because more than any other sport here—and possibly around the world—baseball feels and sounds right on the radio.
First off, it’s a slow game. There’s plenty of time during a three-hour game for the narrators to describe what’s going on. Second, the game is very structured . There is one player per position. The game is divided into nine parts called innings, each with a home and away half. Each one of those halves has three outs. In most plays, only one thing happens at a time .
Everything has a name; everything can be recorded and re-told. There are a lot of statistics that describe the game and each player’s performance . So unlike soccer , basketball, or even American football, the game’s structure lends itself to being told rather than seen. Anyone who knows the game can picture the action just from an announcer’s voice .
For most of its history, baseball was a daytime sport. Games started in the early afternoon because the fields didn’t have lighting . So many people would listen while they worked, while they were driving , or while they were doing their daytime chores .
And there is a game every day. In American football, for example, teams play just once a week : you can make an appointment to watch that on television. But a Major League Baseball season is 162 games long, ten times more games than a football season. So a lot of fans catch games on the radio throughout the season. Fans listen to games while they do yardwork , while they’re at backyard barbeques , on fishing trips , or just while they drift away to sleep at night.
Finally, the radio is free. In the early days, television was not as common as it is today. In the 1980s, baseball games moved onto pay television ; now, they’re also on streaming services . That all requires payment . But the radio is and always has been free .
Each team has its own set of broadcasters who call the games for radio stations in their regions . And for many people, the hometown radio broadcasters become the “voice of the team.” Sometimes, the broadcasters stay for a long time . And that is how it was for the Brooklyn—and later Los Angeles—Dodgers.
In 1950, Vin Scully had just graduated from Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, where he was born. He played baseball in college, but he really shined as a broadcaster . He helped create the Fordham University radio station, WFUV, which is still a popular New York-area station today.
And he was one of its first stars , broadcasting Fordham Rams baseball, football, and basketball. He got a few opportunities doing professional broadcasts as a recent graduate . But then he got his big break: he was invited to be the third member of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ broadcast team.
By 1954, he had the top job. And in 1958, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, bringing the “ national pastime ” to the West Coast for the first time. Vin Scully went with the team and he called Los Angeles Dodgers games on the radio and television until his retirement in 2016. When he retired, he had been broadcasting Dodgers baseball for 67 years. He also broadcast playoff and World Series games for a national television audience .
The red-haired Scully had an instantly-recognizable voice and his own personal style. Many broadcasters would openly cheer for the home team, but Scully always preferred to narrate the game without that kind of “homer” emotion . He treated each broadcast as if he were relaying the details of the game to a friend; he always said he was inviting listeners to “ pull up a chair ” and listen with him.
Toward the end of his career, he treated listeners to stories of the famous players he knew in the past, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and others. News of his death started to spread on the night of August 2; it came out after the east-coast games were done, but while the west-coast games, including the Dodgers game, were still being played. During the Dodgers game, of course, and then the whole next day, the team broadcasts and the sports news and talk shows were all full of tributes to probably America’s most famous sports broadcaster.
Reflections on baseball on the radio
Baseball was once America’s most popular sport. It no longer is, but it does have a prominent place in our culture . And the people who bring it to us, especially on the radio, when there are no images to distract you, those people are a big part of how we enjoy the sport.
When I was a kid, I had a bedtime and I had to be in my room, in bed, with the lights out at a certain time. And if the Yankees game was still going, I was allowed to listen to the game on the radio. But I had to be in bed. And so I had a radio by the window—this sounds like it was forever ago, but it’s true—and I positioned the antenna and got WABC from New York and listened to John Sterling and Michael Kay narrate the Yankees games. And that was the case for so, so many young fans.
Now I’m spoiled because I can listen to any team’s radio broadcast in the MLB app, including the Spanish-language version, too. I watch a lot of games, but I listen to them too—while I’m driving, cooking, working, or just lying in bed .
You don’t hear about that with other sports—you don’t hear about kids staying up late to listen to NBA basketball games. You need to see a basketball game.
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