Vin Scully
Vin Scully has been the poetic, mellifluous voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers for 60 years. The Peabody Award-winner and baseball broadcasting Hall of Fame member had been set to retire in 2009, but decided to spend one more summer in the booth, sharing his trademark opening, "Hi again, everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you, wherever you may be."
The legendary play-by-play man is scheduled to call it quits after the 2010 season, even though some fans still haven't accepted the inevitable day when he will no longer call the games.
"More enduring than any player, more impactive than any manager, more intertwined with this city than the color blue, Scully is not only the voice of the team, but its soul," L.A. Times columnist Bill Plaschke wrote in 2009.
Though Scully hails from an earlier era, he's been able to draw fans from all age groups and backgrounds, including Dodger mega-fan Roberto, the man behind the Vin Scully Is My Homeboy website, Facebook page and merchandise.
Scully, a New York native, played baseball at Fordham University and worked for the school paper and radio station. He started working alongside iconic announcer Red Barber calling Brooklyn Dodger games in 1950 and landed in Los Angeles in 1958 with the relocation of the team.
With his smooth tenor voice, he turned baseball into theater, favoring simple, elegant language rather than hyperbole. There's no formal archive of Scully's work, but his great moments, like calling Sandy Koufax's 1965 perfect game, can be found on the Dodgers' and Major League Baseball's websites, on YouTube and in private collections. Some of the broadcasts, though, are lost forever.
An intensely private and humble man, Scully didn't participate in a 2009 biography of his rise in the radio and TV business, "Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story," written by Curt Smith.
"The game is the thing, not me," Scully told The Times in 1998. "I am just a conduit for the game. I am the guy between the expert and the fan. I am not the expert."
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