Skip to content
Phillies
Link copied to clipboard

Dodgers announcer Vin Scully started his 67-year career in Philadelphia

If he were a younger, more sentimental man, Vin Scully probably would have accompanied the Dodgers to Philadelphia for the Citizens Bank Park series that begins Tuesday.

If he were a younger, more sentimental man, Vin Scully probably would have accompanied the Dodgers to Philadelphia for the Citizens Bank Park series that begins Tuesday.

But the sport's most eloquent, mellifluous and beloved broadcaster is 88 now and happy for any respite from the spotlit hoopla that has accompanied his 67th and last season.

A final visit here would have brought Scully full circle, back to the city where, in the third inning of a Dodgers-Phillies game at Shibe Park on April 18, 1950, his long and distinguished career officially began.

No tapes survive from that Philadelphia debut, when partners Red Barber and Connie Desmond yielded the mike to him for the third and seventh innings of the Phillies' season-opening 9-1 victory.

And Scully, who has politely declined most interview requests, including from the Inquirer, has said he recalls almost nothing from that first of more than 10,000 broadcasts as a Dodgers announcer.

"But the one thing I do remember," Scully said last year, "was that I was terrified."

On that springtime Tuesday in 1950, the Dodgers were the defending National League champions about to open the season against the Phillies.

As 29,074 fans entered the North Philadelphia ballpark - an opening-day record for the historically forlorn franchise - there was palpable promise in a city that hadn't witnessed postseason baseball since the Athletics, the Phillies' Shibe Park landlords, lost the 1931 World Series.

Young and talented, the 1950 Phils already had a sports-page nickname, the "Whiz Kids." Seeking to capitalize on the optimism, owner Bob Carpenter heeded a fashion suggestion from manager Eddie Sawyer.

"Our uniforms were the ugliest things you ever saw," Sawyer recalled in 1990. "I thought our young team needed a new look."

So that day, for a first time, the Phils wore the uniforms that 66 years later remain standard home attire. Milky white with red pinstripes and the team's name in red script across the chest, they were boldly accented by cherry-red caps and socks.

As the freshly outfitted Phillies were thumping Brooklyn - the Dodgers had yet to relocate to Los Angeles - behind 23-year-old Robin Roberts, another enduring baseball tradition was being born in the tiny visiting radio booth, which, like a mountain aerie, projected out perilously from the press box.

Brooklyn catcher Roy Campanella, his boyhood Nicetown neighborhood just a short walk from the ballpark, was in the batter's box to start the third inning. That's when Barber, the lead Dodgers announcer, introduced his new partner, a skinny 22-year-old with a lofty red pompadour named Vin Scully.

Scully, who served briefly in the Navy toward the end of World War II, played center field at Fordham where, until he discovered campus radio station WFUV, he'd dreamed of becoming a serious writer.

"My ambition had been to have a literary career," he once said. "I got cured by radio."

Following graduation in 1949, he found a summer internship at Washington's 50,000-watt WTOP, where Barber, who also served as CBS Radio's sports director, first heard him.

The following fall when CBS needed someone to provide live updates from a Maryland-Boston University football game, Barber remembered Scully.

Though the youngster's broadcast position that windy Saturday was atop Fenway Park's roof, he never let the conditions affect his call, further impressing his soon-to-be boss.

Long resisted by hidebound owners, radio - and to a lesser extent TV - was becoming a major force during the postwar baseball boom. All Dodgers games had been broadcast since 1947, and beginning in 1949 a few were televised by WOR-TV.

When in November 1949 Ernie Harwell, one of Brooklyn's three announcers, departed for a job with the rival Giants, Barber contacted Scully, who accepted the job for $5,000 annually.

A younger, much-less-experienced third wheel behind the popular and more-than-competent Barber and Desmond, Scully got little work that first spring training.

Barber was a stern mentor. When he saw Scully drinking a beer in the press box that first season, he angrily rebuked him. Such fastidiousness had driven away the easygoing Harwell and initially bothered Scully.

" 'Red's giving me a hard time,' " Scully recalled telling Harwell. "But Ernie advised me to hang in there. [He said,] 'Barber is tough, but he's a great teacher.' "

Desmond, whose alcoholism would end his career prematurely, was a gentler but more erratic influence.

"Red was like the father. He might chew me out once in a while," Scully said. "Connie was the older brother. He might counsel me and calm me down. I was the kid brother."

On opening day 1950, Scully, who still lived with his parents in Bogota, N.J., traveled here by train from New York. Deboarding at North Philadelphia Station, he taxied to nearby Shibe Park.

The hours moved slowly for the anxious rookie. He chatted with the players and, as would long be his custom, took notes. Just 22, he'd developed an easy rapport with the Dodgers, though Barber cautioned him that getting too close might endanger his objectivity.

As game time neared, Scully moved to the claustrophobic radio booth where he nervously sat through the Phillies' opening day festivities.

"Here I was, the team's No. 3 announcer," he recalled in 2014, "and I was still living with my parents. I was very unsure of the future."

Elliott Lawrence's Orchestra provided pregame music for the big crowd that included Mayor Bernard Samuel. A wheelchair-bound World War I vet named Si Rappaport threw out the ceremonial first ball. And after a Marine color guard brought in the flag, Philadelphia's Police and Firemen's Band played the national anthem.

Then home plate umpire Babe Pinelli yelled, "Play ball!," Roberts threw a fastball to Brooklyn's Pee Wee Reese, and the season, if not yet Scully's career, was underway.

The Phils took an instant lead when Richie Ashburn singled and Granny Hamner doubled on Don Newcombe's first two pitches. They were up, 5-0, in the top of the third when Barber handed the microphone to "a young fella I hope you're going to like."

There's no way to know if Scully used his now-familiar greeting ("Hi, everybody, and a very pleasant good day to you, wherever you may be") or whether that musical voice employed any of the graceful metaphors or literary references he so enjoys.

There certainly wasn't much drama to relate. His first call was a Campanella single up the middle. Scully's debut inning then ended routinely after Roberts struck out the next two Dodgers and George Shuba popped up to the infield.

More relaxed, he returned for the seventh, when a little excitement bubbled. Jackie Robinson's double began the inning. But, despite two subsequent singles and a pair of Phillies errors, Brooklyn scored just once.

When Phils catcher Andy Seminick grounded out to Reese to end the seventh, Scully's first day on the job was over.

On Tuesday, the 2016 Phils will be wearing the same uniforms they unveiled in that now historic game. And Scully, though he won't be there, is still the Dodgers broadcaster.

During those 61/2 decades, he's become the most respected baseball voice ever. Whether it's the World Series or any of the countless all-star, playoff or nationally televised games he's worked, Scully has managed to combine a pleasant conversational tone with rare erudition.

Listening to him, said Tom Winship, an author who grew up a Dodgers fan in Brooklyn, is like listening "to a bar pal . . . with Einstein's wisdom."

"His command of the language and the game is so masterful that he always has just the right words," wrote Gary Kauffman in a Salon.com profile. "He paints you a picture."

On the final day of that 1950 season, the Phillies beat the Dodgers again, this time in Brooklyn, to clinch the pennant.

Afterward, his rookie year ended in disappointment, Scully encountered Dodgers rightfielder Carl Furillo, who had failed to drive in what would have been the winning run.

"I said to Furillo what a young kid would," Scully told Sports Illustrated in 2000. " 'Tough luck.' And Furillo looked at me and responded, 'You either do or you don't.' It was the most professional approach and because it was my first year, it stuck with me."

Two months from the end of Scully's historic 67-year career, his broadcast style unaffected by countless changes to the game he loves and enhances, it clings to him still.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz