Pull up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story (review)

From the East Coast to West Coast, Vin Scully is as much a part of the American landscape as the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge. His celebrity knows no boundaries. One of the lead characters in TV’s The X-Files (Dana Scully, played by Gillian Anderson) was named for him. Pull Up a Chair, Curt Smith’s latest book on broadcasting and the national pastime, provides a reverential portrait of Vincent Edward Scully, a native New Yorker who grew to legend in Southern California. Scully’s six decades as “voice of the Dodgers”—he’s their last link to Brooklyn—rank near the summit of baseball longevity, up there with Connie Mack’s reign as manager of the Athletics and Bob Sheppard’s years as Yankee public address announcer.

Scully grew up in Washington Heights, the same northern Manhattan neighborhood that later produced Manny Ramirez. In 1949, Scully graduated from Fordham University in the Bronx and, not long after, CBS radio network head Red Barber recruited him as a college football announcer. Recognizing raw talent in the younger redhead, Barber subsequently hired him for the Dodgers radio booth.

In the ensuing years, baseball has trekked westward, taken on new teams, weathered challenges from professional leagues in other sports, adopted a draft, made adjustments for television, survived free agency and double-knits, added a playoff system, and gone global. And Scully went from green on-air talent (he once declared that Pittsburgh had tied the Pirates) to baseball’s man of letters. “I grew up on Barber,” noted NBC’s Al Michaels. “Scully succeeds him. Best two Voices, and I get ‘em both” (156).

Uprooting the Dodgers, Walter O’Malley broke a borough’s heart. “L.A. deserved a franchise,” Smith observes. “It did not deserve Brooklyn’s” (61). O’Malley avoided greater sin by eschewing advice to ditch Scully in favor of an established West Coast voice. Los Angeles fans soon began to carry transistor radios to the Coliseum in hope of seeing games through Scully’s poetic viewpoint. The Dodgers brought the World Series to California in their second year on the West Coast, and Scully’s reputation blossomed. “Vin entered 1959 as a phenom,” writes Smith. “He left it as a phenomenon” (80).

For three-plus pages, Smith lingers over Scully’s on-air description of the last inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game against the Giants—the best radio broadcast in baseball history, according to the Scribner Encyclopedia (100). The transcript, presented in full, makes a convincing argument, even without the benefit of Scully’s melodic tenor: “And Koufax, with a new ball, takes a hitch at his belt, and walks behind the mound,” intoned Scully with one out in the ninth, adding, after a caesura, “I would think that the mound at Dodgers Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world” (100).

By the late 1960s, Scully supplanted Mel Allen as the gold standard of baseball broadcasters. “If you want to see the game, listen to Scully,” urged a Los Angeles beat writer (123). Pirates announcer Bob Prince once turned down an offer to work for the San Diego Padres, claiming, “You’ve got desert to the east, ocean to the west, Mexico to the south, and Scully to the north” (69). The Gunner raised a valid point: luring Scully’s listeners would be tantamount to weaning sweet-feeding ants off sugar. Even at Anaheim Stadium, Angels fans toted portable radios to catch his crisp, crystal-clear calls of Dodgers games.

Smith recounts forays into tennis, golf and football (Scully called NFL contests for CBS from 1975 to 1982), as well as a gimmicky network game show called It Takes Two, where the courtly Scully was an easy mark for practical jokers. During one live episode, he was supposed to retrieve the answer to a question from the back of a classic sedan. When he opened the trunk, there lay...