Vin Scully Quotes

I don't like to be alone, but I do cherish the moments that I'm alone with a good book.

Before the game, he [Vin Scully] waxed poetic about Wrigley Field: She stands alone at the corner of Clark and Addison, this dowager queen, dressed in basic black and pearls, seventy-five years old, proud head held high and not a hair out of place, awaiting yet another date with destiny, another time for Mr. Right. She dreams as old ladies will of men gone long ago. Joe Tinker. Johnny Evers. Frank Chance. And of those of recent vintage like her man Ernie. And the Lion [Leo Durocher]. And Sweet Billy Williams. And she thinks wistfully of what might have been, and the pain is still fresh and new, and her eyes fill, her lips tremble, and she shakes her head ever so slightly. And then she sighs, pulls her shawl tightly around her frail shoulders, and thinks, This time, this time it will be better.

A sunset breeze out of Chavez Ravine stirred the warm air. Families were outside on their porches, some listening to the radio and others just talking. Pike heard Vin Scully, calling the game from nearby Dodger Stadium, Dodgers up over the Giants, five to two. Most of the neighbors appeared to be Eastern Europeans. Across the street, five young men who sounded Armenian were standing around a late-model BMW. They laughed together, and one of them spoke loudly, trying to make a point over the laughter.

It would have been unthinkable for anyone on the block not to know the names of the players, their batting averages, and the win-loss record of the pitchers. We knew who they were playing on a given day, where they were playing, who was pitching, and how many games out of first place they might be. We also knew as much information about their personal lives as the baseball cards we flipped and traded provided. Most of our contact with the Dodgers came through the radio and TV play-by-play commentary of Red Barber and Vin Scully, who were as familiar to us as the players.

Baseball here didn’t set out to be daffy,” said Scully. “It just evolved.

Above all, Ebbets was participant, not spectator.

The one thing that has stood out to me,” Scully noted, “is how Jackie was able to produce so well on the field with so much pressure on him. He had to know, more than anyone else, that if he failed, it may have set back the cause for years, maybe forever.

repeating the score and the outs and the men on base. The funny thing is that it kept me alert.

To Murray, he was as “valid an alibi as a letter from the chaplain.

It simply felt better to have a friendly voice guiding me through the excitement, just as it felt better to look across and see my father.

William Manchester wrote of mid-1950s’ America: “To those who cherished it [the age] has come to be remembered as an uncomplicated, golden time, mourned as lost childhoods are mourned, and remembered, in nostalgia, as cloudless.

Vin added realism, lyricism, intimacy, love of history, grasp of workaday joy and fear, and a voice less Pavarotti than Perry Como. Bill Stern turned heads. Scully woos them.

He might not be the Voice of God—not deep enough, someone might quibble, not scary enough—but surely it is the Voice of Heaven,” wrote the Washington Post’s Dave Sheinin in 2005.

As some baseball fans have [long] known and others are just learning, heaven on earth is a good car and an open road, or a soft chair and a cold beer, and Vin Scully calling the action,

Wright Morris wrote of Norman Rockwell, “His special triumph is in the conviction his countrymen share that the mythical world he evokes actually exists.

He was more than just their announcer when the Dodgers came west,” Jim continued. “He was the link to the great Dodger past explaining the new family in the block.