Weber Talks Sports Episode 1: Vin Scully

This is the first episode of the Webber Talks Sports Video Show hosted by Jason Webber. He thanks the listeners and introduces the show, which will include daily sports analysis and other segments. He thanks the sponsor, Webber Grills, and talks about Vince Scully, a famous sports announcer who called Dodger games for 67 years. Scully had a successful career and was influenced by Red Barber. He had iconic calls and a great voice. Scully had a positive relationship with players, including Jackie Robinson. MLB teams sent condolences when Scully passed away. Alright, alright, alright, good morning everybody, this is the Webber Talks Sports Video Show. I am your host Jason Webber and this is the, actually the first episode of the show. So if you are listening in I just want to start off by giving you a massive thank you. And hopefully you do stick around because on the show I will be giving you a daily sports analysis from around the country as well as some other hot takes and other segments that are going to be a lot of fun in my opinion and I hope that you enjoy them, I hope you learn something while listening to some random college kid talk about sports on a daily basis. Before I do get started though I would like to give a huge thank you to the first sponsor of the show which is Webber Grills. Webber raises the bar on grilling, delivering even heat and even better taste. With quality and innovation in everything they do, Webber has the perfect grill for you. Use discount code WebberTent at checkout and save 10% on your newest items from Webber Grills. Once again thank you to Webber Grills for sponsoring the show and now let's get started. So today's topic of discussion I want to talk about today is a very important one in my opinion as without the man that I'm going to discuss we probably don't have a lot of the famous sports announcers or broadcasters that we have today and the landscape of sports announcing in media would probably be different if this guy just never went into the field and that is none other than Vince Scully who most famously called Dodger games for 67 years. Now I personally could not even imagine doing anything for 67 years let alone sports broadcasting and just talking about sports for that amount of time but nonetheless he did it and he did a pretty damn good job at it and he deserves all the recognition that he's gotten and I just want to get into his story because I found it to be a very interesting one at that. So he had actually served in the Navy prior to even thinking about doing sports announcing or broadcasting anything of that nature. He served in the Navy from the mid-1940s up until he became a college student at Fordham University and he ended up founding their FM radio station WFUV which now gives out an award in his honor which I think is honestly really awesome and I think he really deserves that. After calling radio broadcasts for multiple teams at the school, baseball, football, basketball, you name it he probably did it, he graduated college and he started looking for jobs all along the country looking for a job in sports radio and the only ones who had answered him ended up being a CBS radio affiliate which is WTOP located in Washington DC and from there Scully was hired by Red Barber as a fill-in announcer for college football games and which gets me into the my next point I want to talk about who had influenced Vin Scully. Red Barber was his main influence at the time. He was the one who gave him the job at CBS sports radio and he had Scully start his first assignment in a 1949 college football game between Maryland and Boston College and the game took place at Fenway Park. It was a very cold day from my understanding of how the day went and the story goes that Vin Scully actually had forgotten a coat and gloves that day and despite it being freezing cold he had never mentioned it once on the air which was so impressive to Barber that he wanted Vin Scully to be molded into someone that was going to be in sports radio for a very long time and that is what ended up happening with him. One of the points that Barber wanted Scully to understand is that you shouldn't be favoring one side you should be a very impartial broadcaster who calls games right down the middle and from there after Barber had given this advice he was brought on to the Brooklyn Dodgers broadcasting booth along with Red Barber and Connie Desmond after Ernie Hartwell famously had left the Dodgers booth in 1950 to cover the Crosstown Rabble of Giants and they covered the Dodgers games for a couple of years until 1954 once Red Barber had taken a job with the Yankees and from there Scully had done the broadcasting with a couple of different duos but none of them really stuck until it was Jerry Doggett in 1956 and then from there they were together for 32 years and they were said to have great chemistry together so I would say that's probably the most famous duo that he was a part of or any sort of booth that was iconic for him and speaking of iconic getting the nickname the voice of heaven is probably the coolest nickname I could imagine for an announcer of any kind and he kind of got that voice he kind of got that nickname rather because of some of the calls that he made over the years and just his very raspy and like older sounding voice in general over the years as time went on you would recognize his voice from absolutely anywhere he could be calling any game any sport and you'd know it was him even without him saying his name you would know it's been Scully right off the bat and that's why he kind of has that voices have a nickname some like I said some of those famous calls that he's had over his tenure is the Dodgers announcer the intro for example that he always does the it's time for a Dodger baseball hi everybody and a very pleasant good evening or afternoon to you wherever you may be now I thought this one was very important not only because he does it every single Dodgers broadcast that he ever did but he also ended his career with that very sentence and he was kind of like speaking to the audience in a way as like a hey guys like I know we were together for as many years as we were but the spring look it was kind of like the spring will come and like it'll be time for a Dodger baseball then but it'll be without me and it was a very touching way to end his career with ascended somewhere that some other calls that he had obviously game one of the 88 World Series with Kirk Gibson's walk-off homerun he goes all year long they look to him when the Kirk Gibson to light the fire and all year long he answered the demands high fly ball into right field she is gone and then there was a brief pause for as he's rounding the bases he's jumping up he's screaming he's he's yelling and then he goes and then this guy goes a year that he's been so improbable the impossible has happened and it really was for that for that period of time like the Dodgers they hadn't won a World Series for a while and they finally got to the big dance again and they won so that call really really set them up now one other call that I want to touch on because I don't want to touch on like everything I could go on this could be a whole hour and a half episode at minimum for just all the calls that he's done but I think the most famous one of all probably has to be game six of the 1986 World Series it just I mean as a Mets fan it rings through my head whenever I think of that moment his voice just makes it the biggest moment probably in the team's entire history and it's arguably one of the greatest moments in baseball history and the call is amazing I mean it's the bottom of the 10th inning the Mets were down two runs they had to score they rallied behind they got they kept getting hit after hit after hit and then they got the wild pitch to score Mitchell at the tying run Ray Knights at second base I mean I could hear it as I'm saying it and then he calls three and two to with two outs three and two to Mookie Wilson a little roller up along first behind the bag it gets through Buckner here comes night and the Mets win it and then after just a big set there's like a several minute pause and then after all the celebration of course then he resumes with if a picture was worth a thousand words you've seen a million words but more than that you've seen an bizarre finish to game six of the 1986 World Series the Mets are not only alive they are well and they will play the Red Sox in game seven tomorrow now to me they he could not have said it any better and I think that was just the greatest call that I've ever heard of all time it's not I don't even think it's relatively close and that's that's just how I think for the call and just the final point that I want to wrap up on is just his impact like overall impact like his report with players and just who he had influenced to later on but to start off I want to just talk about some of the players that he had a positive report with he actually didn't really interview players all that often but he did have one specific relationship with a player that I do want to highlight because I think it's very very important to acknowledge that this happened it was his relationship with Jackie Robinson and which we know it was controversial in the early late 50s to have a relationship with Jackie Robinson of any magnitude but Vince Scully didn't care about that he was very very friendly with Jackie regardless of the color of their skin and all the issues that were going on back then there's actually a very interesting story that I discovered he actually invited Jackie Robinson out to ice skate one night in 1950 and they seemed to like based on that even alone I feel like not knowing how they really really interacted just knowing based on stories and whatnot the two had a very positive relationship throughout their time together as friends and just the inference like Vince Scully would do that probably for 90 per 9% of the players that are around today like I don't see a reason why he wouldn't do that considering he did it for Jackie Robinson all those years ago granted he probably couldn't ice skate in his 90s but I'm sure they would have positive conversations together no matter who it was and I say that because of the relationship that MLB had as a whole with him because when he unfortunately had passed away in August of 2022 every MLB team had sent other condolences to Scully and his family through social media through TV radio broadcasts you name it the whole baseball world essentially went silent because of his passing and especially the people who were influenced by him they had definitely spoken out on that and some of these names we all we've all heard them like guys like Joe Buck Bob Costas Al Michaels Gary Cohen just to name a few and reading through some of the interviews that they had with Scully or like interviews where they were discussing him after his passing they all spoke extremely highly of him they truly thought of him as a mentor and they couldn't have asked for a better guy to learn from and just pick from his brain and understand how he called games and that's just the point that I want to end off on I once again thank you for tuning in to Warbird Talk Sports Radio this was the first episode of hopefully many more and hope to see you on the next one all right take it easy