On Tuesday, August 2nd, we learned of the passing of one of the game’s legendary announcers.  Vin Scully died at the age of 94, after authoring one of the most brilliant careers in the history of baseball broadcasting.  I spent seven seasons of my broadcasting career in Anaheim with the Angels, and in my time in Southern California I had the opportunity to listen to Scully often and cross paths with him every year.

In my book, Major League Mindset:  Elevate Your Baseball Play-by-Play, I talked about what I learned from hanging around the best broadcasters in the business.  Here is an excerpt of what I wrote about Scully:

It’s almost inconceivable to think that someone could spend 67 years broadcasting major league baseball, but that’s just one reason why Scully was so special.  Scully broadcasted much of his career solo, which to me is astounding.  But, if there was ever a broadcaster that could work alone every night, it’s Scully.  His storytelling skills were unmatched, and his timing was impeccable.  He knew exactly when to start a story and how to tell it flawlessly.  When you spend 67 years in the booth, you tend to accumulate a lot of anecdotes and Scully was the master at blending his knowledge of the game’s history into the play-by-play.  From him, one thing I learned was the importance of not relying so much on statistical analysis in a broadcast and instead humanizing the players through storytelling.

That doesn’t mean I was good at it, but watching someone do it well was like going to a broadcasting class every night.  His classroom just happened to be Dodger Stadium.  When I was broadcasting for the Angels in the mid-90s, I took the opportunity to tape Scully’s broadcasts so that I could learn from him.  Each year, the Angels and Dodgers would play a series at the end of spring training, and I recall taping one of the games and listening back the next day.  I was shocked at how much he knew about our players.  In fact, he seemed to know as much about our players, if not more, than I did.  It was a good lesson that I learned early in my career about the value of preparation.  This was only a spring training broadcast, and he treated it like a regular season game.

Scully also had a sense of knowing how to let dramatic plays breathe, while delivering a smart, concise description that many times was unforgettable.  His call of Kirk Gibson’s home run in the 1988 World Series, is in my opinion, his best ever.

He had a sense that the moment was powerful enough and he knew when to stay out of the way.

While the term “the best” is always subjective, Scully may be the one announcer that deserved the descriptor.