Vin Scully recently watched the MLB Network replay of the perfect game pitched by Don Larsen for the New York Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1956 World Series. He watched and he listened.
He listened to Mel Allen call the first half of the game and then listened to himself, an earnest and eager 28-year-old, call the second half.
What did Scully notice about that broadcast? People have asked that a lot since the rebroadcast was aired Jan. 1 on the new MLB Network. Because the game re-airs today at 11 a.m., it's appropriate to listen to what Scully thinks now of that game and what he thought then.
Did he seem surprised that his voice, the voice of a kid almost, one who was still living at home with his parents and his sister, sounds exactly the same as the 81-year-old man who has described baseball with a simple, elegant phrase turn for 60 years? Or that in the 1956 broadcast that his hair was slicked back as if he were trying to look dressed up for a grand occasion or that he made shaving with a Gillette razor sound deeply intellectual and almost a little romantic in a commercial?
"Here's what I noticed," Scully said. "I was a little surprised, looking back, at how primitive televised baseball was. How much better it is [today] with all the cameras, all the angles, the close-ups, the replays of every imaginable area compared to almost a stationary camera behind home plate, no center-field camera. To me, that was about as simple as it gets.
"Another thing, in those days, radio and television wasn't a cottage industry. Now everybody has a television set, don't they? The approach in those days was, we were always told to be quiet, don't talk. Ball one, strike one, fouled back, don't say much else. Today under those circumstances, we'd be talking up the drama, the tension, telling people who Don Larsen is, what he does. We were somewhat intimidated by talking in those days."
Yet, even in this media world of yapping about what did so-and-so eat last night, whom did he cuss at in the locker room, why did he not take that pitch or swing at that one, Scully still thrives and his enthusiasm for his craft and the sport isn't easily contained.
For example, Scully suggested that in watching the rebroadcast he noticed how few shots of the Yankee Stadium crowd were shown.
"One of the things we'd have today, we would have gone into the stands more in a game of that magnitude," Scully said. "We would have shown fans reacting more, screaming and shouting.
