Dodgers icon and multi-generational voice Vin Scully passes away at 94

No baseball team, throughout the game’s great history, has sounded as mellifluous and beautiful as the Los Angeles Dodgers. The modern broadcast booth birthed Joe Davis onto the national scene. Orel Hershiser is perceptive and gregarious. But for decades upon decades, listeners in both English and Spanish have been blessed by voices that can paint a scene in effortless prose, with the airwaves dominated by both Jaime Jarrin and Vin Scully.

Jarrin, 86 years old, will retire after the 2022 season concludes. Scully retired a few years prior, following the 2016 campaign at the age of 88, still as razor sharp at the conclusion of that year as he was when he’d begun in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ radio booth back in 1950.

No matter what the coast, when Scully cleared his throat and tapped the mic, it was always time for Dodger baseball. And, when the sun rises on Wednesday, Dodger baseball will still persist. Scully, for the first time in over 70 years, will not be a witness.

The iconic voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose dulcet tones will eternally accompany any mental image of a swing and a drive at Chavez Ravine across multiple generations, passed away at the age of 94, the team announced on Tuesday night.

Dodgers announcer Vin Scully passes away at age 94

Scully’s legacy is untouchable. From Dwight Clark’s The Catch with CBS Sports to Kirk Gibson’s hobbled homer into the night in ’88 to — we cannot stress this enough — 67 years of Dodger baseball, there will never be a more pleasant salesman for America’s grandest games.

Fittingly, Scully’s final performance on behalf of the Dodgers came after the 2020 season, which ended in a drought-breaking World Series at the end of the darkest year most of us could remember. Scully came out of retirement to pitch-perfectly narrate the team’s World Series film, reveling in the same gilded landscape as Clayton Kershaw and Dave Roberts.

For Scully, too, it had been a long time. But, of course, he had decades of championship experience to draw upon as he presented the men of the moment.

When Scully signed off for the final time in Oct. 2016 at AT&T Park in San Francisco, he summed up his effect on the fan base with a parting message better than I ever could:

You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know in my heart that I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But you know what? There will be a new day and eventually a new year. And when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, rest assured, once again it will be “time for Dodger baseball.” So this is Vin Scully wishing you a very pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.

There will be a new day. There will be a new year. There will never be another Vin Scully.

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