AS A BOY, Vincent Edward Scully often lay on the floor in the front room of his family's Washington Heights fifth-floor walk-up, put his head on a pillow tucked under a tabletop radio and listened to Saturday morning football games. He loved the spark of the announcer's voice coming through the speaker from some far-off stadium and imagined himself in the crowd, surrounded by its happy roar. The sound, he said years later, "just poured over me."
Scully broadcast Dodgers games, first in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles, starting in the spring of 1950. It is the longest association between a single franchise and an announcer in American professional sports history.