Close your eyes

The magic of Vin Scully

I’ve posted a few video clips below, and I want to ask a favor: Once you press play, don’t watch the videos. Just close your eyes and listen.

Baseball is a TV sport now—it needs TV money to survive—but in my heart it will always be a game for the radio. There’s no clock. The brilliance of baseball lies in the pauses between the pitches. Late in the game, or late in the season, those pauses fill with drama. Other times—the second inning of a game in May—those pauses can hold space for anything you might think about. Even the history of beards.

A baseball game, more than anything, is a vessel to tell stories. And no one ever told the stories of a game better than Vin Scully.

Scully died Tuesday at 94. He had retired just six years ago. He called games for the Dodgers—first in Brooklyn, then Los Angeles—for 67 years.

He worked as a national broadcaster, too, covering not just baseball but football and golf—he called “The Catch” in the famous 49ers-Cowboys playoff game in 1982.

But look, this is not a recap of Vin Scully’s life. There are many other tributes out in the world this morning. My favorite is the piece my friend Joe Posnanski wrote about him back in 2010. I don’t need to add another thousand words to the pile.

And anyway, it feels like the best tribute to Vin Scully is to hear him tell a story, and another, and another.

He was the voice of tense Octobers and hazy summer nights. He was the narrator for some of sports’ greatest moments. But more than anything he was a reason, in this scattered and chaotic world, to stop for a few minutes and listen. He knew one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language: Let me tell you a story.