When the Dodgers moved to LA in the late 1950s, not all their games were on TV, so fans followed the action on their transistor radios, listening to the iconic voice of the legendary Vin Scully. LA Times Bill Shaikin wrote about the special relationship between Scully and the fans who listened to him. He joined host Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today.”
Shaikin explained that fans who were actually in the stadium watching a baseball game would even listen to Scully on their transistor radios to hear his calls.
“It was like a soundtrack to the game. If you got up from your seat to get a Dodger Dog or a Coke or a beer, you didn’t have to worry that you were going to miss the action. And it wasn’t because there were television screens everywhere. It was because everybody was holding up this radio to their ear,” he said.
Scully would talk directly to the fans while he broadcasted. He did not have a partner in the booth with him he spoke to.
“He didn’t want a sidekick, and the Dodgers didn’t make him get one. It was Vin Scully in the third inning. Jerry Doggett, his long-term No. 2 guy, for three innings and then Vin came back for the last three and he talked to you. His conversation was with you,” Shaikin said.
When Scully found out that people would listen to him on their radios from inside the stadium, he conducted an experiment. Shaikin told the story of how Scully tested fans’ listening.
“He was doing his research one night, figuring out what might be interesting to talk about. And he noticed that one of the umpires who was working in the game that night, well, it just happened to be his birthday... So, he said ‘everybody on the count of three, I want you all to yell to this umpire and say ‘Happy Birthday, Frank.’ The whole place erupted,” Shaikin shared.
One of the reasons Scully was so beloved by baseball enthusiasts even outside the Dodgers fandom was that he was always impartial and informative as he called a game.
“A lot of times you see, especially now, broadcasters are essentially hype men or hype women for the teams that they cover. ... Vin wasn’t a guy that was going to rip the Dodgers necessarily, but if he saw a guy make a bad play, he wasn’t going to tell you he made a good one,” Shaikin said. “He wasn’t going to make an excuse. He was just going to tell you what happened. And I think people appreciated that as the years went by.”
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