Scully’s introduction to the Fernando Valenzuela game, May 18, 1981.
“Thank you Jerry, hi everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you. Welcome to Dodger Stadium and the prospects of another dramatic evening and perhaps made even more so by the presence of Fernando’s mother and father and sister. In fact this might very well be the most pressure that Fernando has experienced, and that is only a maybe. He does not appear to be, oh, that, that much involved in his wins and the record…But tonight has to be a particularly important night because for the first night in his big league career his mom and dad and sister are sitting in a box just to our right and they’ll be watching his every move. And the first time we saw his mother show any emotion since they’ve been here, when he walked out to the mound, she applauded. And it’ll be pretty hard to do the ball game tonight, watching Fernando, without sneaking a peak down the horseshoe bend of the press box to see how the Valenzuelas are doing up there. The fastball to Lonnie Smith is low and the count ball one, One and 0.”
Vin Scully has been almost without public criticism. Art is ordinarily commented upon, not merely praised. As written earlier, Furman Bisher did refer to a Scully call as “irksome.” The closest to a pronounced, voiced criticism about Scully is at a website posting by Scott Long that refers in a caustic way to him as, “The Pope of Vero Beach.” (On a personal note, that moniker does make me laugh.) This chapter opening of a Fernando Valenzuela game in early 1981, is the occasion of the first visit of his parents to a major league baseball game. Is the Scully introduction unnecessarily sentimental by its inclusion of the Valenzuela family? Does it suggest “kitsch?” a word which suggests both sentimentality and an appeal to popular, rather than higher, culture). Is Scully too right-minded to be considered a great artist producing great art? As perhaps the most difficult question about Scully’s work, it demands a thoughtful answer.
There are three main challenges to the case for Vin Scully Artist. Chapter Three speaks to the challenge of whether Scully’s broadcasting has become art in. Paraphrasing Elliot Eisner, “When does craft become art?” And Eisner’s answer: when the craft transcends its simple, practical functions, when it addresses the universals, when it is treasurable beyond its time and place, when it addresses the human condition, and when it is superlatively well done.” Believing in the truth of these distinctions, broadcasting could certainly become art. By these reputable definitions, there is no reason to reject the case prima facie.
But broadcasting something as “common” as baseball? Well, James Joyce’s Ulysses was ostensibly about a single, normal day. It would be pure snobbishness to dismiss Scully’s art simply because he is broadcasting baseball. The question is whether or not Scully has transcended his craft, and the persistent argument is that he has.
The remaining challenge is more problematic. It is suggested by the website remark by Scott Long. He observes, “I’ve discussed broadcasters before and what thoroughly pisses me off is that everyone in the comments section is willing to bash away, but no one mentions anyone as being good, except for the Pope of Vero Beach.” Perhaps Scott Long is young, likes Adam Sandler movies, and is not enamored with Scully’s implicit civility. Scully is not quite all things to all people, even though in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s long haired hippy looking people, who might not stand for the national anthem, were still carrying transistor radios and listening to Scully. Nonetheless, Scully is not rash, defiant, brash, iconoclastic, rebellious, anarchical, brazen, flippant. However, not being those things does not qualify or disqualify Scully as a candidate for artist in residence.
However, the epithet, “Pope of Vero Beach,” does suggest a judgment about Scully being squeaky clean, to a fault, and for him stooping to too much “kitsch,” too much sentimentality. Scully’s occasional moralisms and his affection (on tv) for crowd shots of children warrant investigation.
Parallels between the art of Norman Rockwell and the broadcasting of Vin Scully are instructive. Historically and primarily, Norman Rockwell has been reviled by art critics. Art critic, Wanda Corn, said about Rockwell’s work that it was “easy, sentimental, and undemanding.” That is symptomatic of accusation by Scott Long about Scully.
The most likely challenge to Scully’s work as Art is parallel to the split opinion on whether one of Norman Rockwell’s most famous paintings, “The Problem We All Deal With,” was his “best work,” or his “weakest.” The painting depicts a small black girl (actually a girl by the name of Ruby Bridges). She is on her way to a first day of school in New Orleans. To “integrate” her new school. She looks especially dressed up in her white dress, hair bow, shoes and socks, perhaps clothes that she wears to Church on Sunday mornings. She is carrying schoolbooks and a ruler. Her white clothes suggest innocence, her school books the possibilities of knowledge, the ruler a sense that a measurement, a judgment is being made. This small child is ostensibly such a threat, she has to have an adult entourage. Four federal marshals serve as her bodyguards; none walk beside her; two in front of her, two behind. Her vulnerability is suggested by both her smallness, and that she is walking much closer to the two marshals in front of her, the two that she can see. The four marshals are much larger than she is, so much so that their heads are not actually shown in the painting, which also suggests a mindlessness about the whole scenario. The wall she is walking past has the n-word scrawled upon it and is splattered with red, apparently from a tossed tomato, presumably thrown by an angry protestor, but a red that suggests the blood from a death from firing squad. Rockwell’s signature is written in a script similar to that of the n-word, suggesting that “the problem that we all deal with” is endemic to everyone and affects everyone, not just schools in New Orleans.
Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times says, “Rockwell’s art was actually weakest when…he tried to make himself into a more ‘serious’ artist by turning out ‘important’ works like “The Problem We All Live With.” He says that, “the picture is vivid and right-minded but also didactic, and it signaled, as critic Dave Hickey has put it, ‘the end of Rockwell’s instinctive identification with the citizens he painted and the beginning of his tenure as a member of the nation’s new, therapeutic, power elite.’” In stark juxtaposition to that evaluation Art Historian Robert Rosenblum describes this same painting as Rockwell’s “best work.” He adds that Rockwell’s work “such as this outing of a hideous American secret, makes such hierarchies as irrelevant as the old fashioned prejudice that photography must be a lower art than painting.”
An article in “Business Week,” considers whether Norman Rockwell is an “American Master or King of Cornpone?” The author, identified as a “contributing editor,” and named Peterson, associates Rockwell with “Kitsch Culture,” and complains that, “Rockwell always wanted (emphasis added) to be an artist,” and that “a big part of Rockwell’s appeal is that his work (like cartoon characters and soup cans) is easy to understand and draws big crowds.” The conclusion is that Rockwell is better described as the King of Cornpone because of such alleged sentimentalism and didacticism, and a like charge would be potentially the most damning in the case against Scully’s mastery as an artist and his work as Art.
While, like Rockwell, Vin Scully rarely produces such emotional and political “statements,” his comments about the black man, Henry Aaron, beating Babe Ruth’s record for career home runs was a work in-kind. After the Henry Aaron 715th homerun, April 8, 1974, and the ensuing noise of the crowd, Scully commentated,
"What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it's a great moment for all of us."
Scully has very similar sensibilities to Rockwell in terms of prejudice and discrimination. While Scully very rarely refers to social issues, his association with the Dodgers aligns him with the team that broke the major league color barrier. Jackie Robinson broke that barrier by joining the Dodgers in 1947, and Scully followed only three years later in 1950. Typically, Scully takes his Jackie Robinson stories and looks for the successes against racism. In a Dodger stadium tribute of Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson, Scully told the crowd a story. "Jackie was busy planting trees under whose shade he never expected to sit…He was a most valuable person as well as a Most Valuable Player." “Scully remembered a day in the visiting clubhouse at the old Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played before the franchise moved to San Francisco. Robinson and Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese were orchestrating a gentlemen's bet to see who would get booed more enthusiastically by the archrival's fans.
Scully said Reese exited the room first and was greeted with an unfathomable amount of boos as soon as he appeared, but that Robinson generated even more jeering before he got through the door, prompting him to wink back at Scully. "I learned that what are boos to you and me were really a tribute to his tremendous athletic ability," Scully said. "It's a moment I'll never forget." Scully acknowledges the existence of prejudice, but tells a story of two teammates and their competitiveness.
Similarly in 2007 he told on radio a story about Jackie Robinson and another Dodger player, Gene Hermanski. It was in conjunction with the Dodgers, and other major league teams, having all the players wear Robinson’s uniform number, #42 on April 15, to celebrate Robinson’s first game in the major leagues, the breaking of the “color barrier.” Scully: “It’s a story I never told before and it happened back about 1951, 52. We were in Cincinnati for the Dodgers to play the Reds and Jackie Robinson had received a threatening letter. And it was a well-typed stationary with a wonderful envelope, and it was rather impressive, which made it more worrisome than normal. Since it had been through the mail, it became a federal issue, and so that day in Cincinnati there were FBI sharpshooters on the roof of the laundry in back of left field, there were police and sharpshooters on the roof of ol’ Crosley Field, and even the post office behind home plate and just off to the right they had FBI and sharpshooters there. Well, you can understand the pressure and the tension. So before the game Charlie Dressen held a meeting trying to tell the fellas somehow forget the atmosphere and concentrate on the game. And all of the sudden a Dodger left fielder by the name of Gene Hermanski said, “I got it.” And they all stopped and looked and said, “What?”. He said, I know what we oughta do. They said, “What?”. He said we’ll all wear number 42, and that will confuse them, and they won’t know who is Jackie Robinson. Well everybody laughed. Jackie laughed probably more than everybody else. Well it’s really appropriate tonight because the first time the only time in major league history a team—The Dodgers—appropriately enough, will all be wearing the same number 42. And Gene Hermanski’s words echo down the corridors of time, and somewhere tonight Jackie Robinson is laughing and saying, “Gene was right, but they’re wearing the number, not to confuse anybody, but instead to salute the measure of a man.” Again, typically Scully. He acknowledges the racism and the danger, but finds the story that affirms the good will of the teammates. In Martin Luther King terms, emphasizing the ‘content of the character’ even in a story inevitably acknowledging the ‘color of the skin.’ Very common values to those of Rockwell and “the problem we all deal with.” Is such didactic? Does it diminish the Art?
A second famous Rockwell painting also establishes common ground, a certain patriotism, with Scully. Rockwell’s “Rosie the Riveter” was painted for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1943. Rosie, a muscular woman, sits atop a post eating a sandwich. She is dressed in overalls. The full backdrop behind her is an American flag. She has both a huge riveting gun and a lunch pail on her lap. She has a proud, pensive face, streaked by grease, as are her hands and arms. Her safety goggles are pushed up above her forehead and her safety mask above her head. She has red curly hair, and the basic colors of the painting are red, white, and blue. She has a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf underfoot, and the outline of a halo just behind her head. Her name is painted on the handle of her riveting gun. The painting is at once both humorous and serious, respectful and patriotic. She can clearly act effectively on behalf of America.
As can Chicago Cub (and future Dodger) Rick Monday. On April 25th, 1976, the Dodgers were playing the Chicago Cubs in a day game at Dodger Stadium. 1976 was the year of the bi-centennial. The Viet Nam had ended the previous year. At the beginning of the inning two men ran onto the field, one stopping in shallow centerfield with something folded under his arm, and a lighter in hand. Like Rosie the Riveter, Rick Monday was prepared to do what his country needed. Vin Scully:
“…ready to take a pitch. Sizemore fouled out in the first inning. He is 0 for 1. And the first one, outside. Ball one. And wait a minute. There’s an animal loose. (And his inflection makes it clear that the analogy is to an animal being loose at the circus). Two of them. All right. I’m not sure what he’s doing out there. It looks like he’s gonna burn a flag. And Rick Monday runs (over), and so Monday takes it away from him. I think the guy was going to set fire to the American flag. Can you imagine that? Well, they better lose him in a hurry. And Monday, when he realized what he was going to do, raced over and took the flag away from him. And now the crowd is doing what they ought to do, all of the time, boo one of these characters. This guy was going to try and perform the indignity of setting fire to the American flag. Well, I hope they have a boat waiting for him. And they will lead him off and hopefully he will really disappear. And for Rick Monday, a good spot. It looked like a piece of cloth. You really couldn’t tell from here what it was, but Monday from his angle took one look and realized it was a flag, and the fellow was evidently already to set fire to it, when Monday realized it. And Rick will get an ovation, and properly so. So, Rick Monday, his alertness, quick thinking, gets a round of applause in centerfield, and on the message board, it just says, ‘Rick Monday, you made a great play.” And Monday, getting another ovation as well he should. And now a lot of the folks are standing. And now the whole ball park. And he’s going to get a standing ovation. And it’s not just for his play. You don’t have to go into it. He took the American flag away from a nut and the crowd appreciates it. And he gets an ovation. That a way to go Rick.”
Two fine artists, Rockwell and Scully, share such common ground. Wayne Mattox says about Rockwell, “employing themes of patriotism, diligence, family, courtship, holidays and small embarrassments we can all relate-to Norman Rockwell celebrated ordinary Americans at play and at work with remarkable warmth and humor. In the sixties his subjects broadened to include, political portraits, poverty, race relations and the space exploration. ‘Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed,’ he said. ‘My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I guess I am a story teller.’"
Most of those values are also found, explicitly, within the lines of Scully’s Dodger work. The Rick Monday story reveals the patriotism. Scully’s story about the ball player whose “Dad forced him to become a switch hitter, and boy has it paid off,” suggests the importance of diligence. “The presence of Fernando’s mother and father and sister,” as one of the frequent references to his implicit value of family. The “bride and the groom,” at San Francisco’s McCovey Cove is an example of Scully finding the courting couples in the crowd. Chuckling to report, “breaking ball brings him to his knees, and then down on his hips,” suggests the good humor about embarrassing moments. The frequent reference of players who were born into dire poverty and made it to the big leagues, “and he said it was a very tough neighborhood,” references both poverty and hope. Scully’s respectful remembrances of Jackie Robinson, his observation at the end of the Aaron homerun, reflect his concern for finding the underlying humanity that might be an antidote to discrimination. Rockwell and Scully are both storytellers, with the frequent theme that, good isn’t good enough, when it should have been better.
In considering Rockwell’s patriotism one reviewer suggested that Rosie the Riveter represented “unquestioning allegiance” to the United States. Quite the contrary. Rockwell’s America will fight to preserve the “four freedoms,” another set of popular Rockwell paintings associated with “patriotism.” The four freedoms are of speech, worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. The allegiance is to the America where human decency expects to prevail over militant ignorance. That differences distinguishes the story telling and art of both Rockwell and Scully.
Certainly, there is evidence of sentimentality in Scully’s work, especially regarding children. Scully observes a sleeping child and says, “sleep the sleep of the sweet child. Bless him.” He commonly comments on “the presence of children.” “Now there’s a bundled up little angel working a pacifier…what a sight!” One certainly might ask what those digressions might have to do with the game?
In related examples, Scully did not discuss the controversy on air about Dodger Ramon Martinez missing extra baseball games because of complications at the birth of his child. Scully was enthused when Martinez did rejoin the team “following that birth of his son.” Scully clearly prefers to avoid the controversies that he must feel are best handled strictly by the participants. He made no mention on air of a well-publicized locker room fight between Dodger teammates Don Sutton and Steve Garvey. On the game before a called player’s strike, he made no reference to the labor dispute. Such are not within his purview. He is more interested in good news. He said about another player that, “the best thing that happened to him in Detroit, his wife presented him with triplets.” Such observation smacks more than a bit of old fashioned sentimentalism. All this certainly relates to a persistent Scully theme: “The Dodger family welcomes each and every family.”
Assuredly, Scully fully appreciates rare moments of emotion and sentiment on the field as well. Long time Colorado Rocky, Vinny Castilla, made his last appearance in a game for his career. Scully commented later in that game, “the greatest moment in the game…was when Vinny Castilla came in as a pinch-hitter…the place went bananas…it was such a beautiful scene.” When Craig Counsel was playing his last game for Arizona Scully described it as “oh what a sweet moment.” A player was “hugged by everyone on the team” and Scully thought that a “beautiful moment.” In a last game of a season Scully noted, “a lot of goodbyes, a lot of good men saying so long.” In Felipe Alou’s last game as San Francisco Giants manager, Scully hoped, “will there be some sort of ovation for Felipe…(it) would be kind of nice…70 years old…come on crowd, let’s hear it for him….no chance…too bad…that would have been nice.”
Scully certainly does have an appreciation for being considerate. Is it moralizing? Frequently he will “still see a lot of folks walking in” to the stadium after the game has already started and he encourages them to “exercise patience.” In referring to an earlier game between the Dodgers and Arizona where there had been a number of bean balls thrown at batters’ heads Scully admonished, “let’s not have that again.” He described it as having been “a very bad game,” and he expressed his “hope nothing like that tonight” would happen. Scully seems consistently on the lookout for signs of good deeds. After a catcher had been hit by a hard foul ball and the umpire stopped to brush off home plate Scully observed that the umpire “does what umpires have done forever, give the catcher a chance to get squared away.”
Perhaps the only Scully observation ever to seem like it might be fawning has been the times he has referred to the crowd as the “tenth man.” Dodger fans are notorious for arriving in the third inning and leaving after the seventh inning. So when Scully refers to “the crowd willing the Dodgers to win the game,” is this the one example of Scully indulging in wishful thinking? Now, having said that, he doesn’t make this reference very often, and certainly the crowd that stayed for the four consecutive ninth inning home runs against San Diego in 2006, seemed to motivate the players. There was an unbelievable electricity in the stadium, so maybe Scully is right even in these instances.
Does Scully’s apparent sentimentalism and moralizing compromise his art? The answer was suggested in Chapters Four and Six. Chapter Four observed that a “text without a context is a pretext.” Scully’s observations about family, good deeds, kindness are always in the context of potentially harsh realities of misfortune. Chapter Six found that the most frequent images, metaphors, analogies he uses are from work and combat. While on the one hand only a “game,”, Scully describes baseball in terms of its work demands, and the constant threat of serious injury (likening it to a moral equivalent of war). In the context of jobs that can be won or lost, and outcomes that are likened to life and death, the dramatic encounters of a baseball game are made more civil with what otherwise might be seen as easy sentiment about children, about players’ emotions, about civil behavior. The sentiment adds a necessary antidote, or perhaps even leaven, to a game that is both difficult and dangerous. This limited solace, these wings of the dove, suggests a grace that makes the action (and life) more tolerable, more meaningful.
Scully frequently mentions the great hardships players overcame to get to the major leagues. “And he said it was a very tough neighborhood.” He “defected to Venezuela” before being able to come to the U.S. to play baseball. He had an “astigmatism in his left eye, myopia in his right eye…and yet despite the disability fought his way to the big leagues.”
And it’s amazing how Scully drops such details into the game itself. In a game against the Mets, Billy Wagner was pitching against the Dodgers:
“a little smoke city on that job, clocked at 97, Wagner is 5’11”, he’s not some giant, 5’11” and 195, but he’s been blessed with the ability to throw that baseball. Billy was not blessed as far as his family life is concerned, product of a split family, and as he said, he went to at least ten different grade schools, he was brought up either from one parent to another, an aunt to a grandmother and back again, but he survived big time.”
As written earlier there are some important similarities between the work of Norman Rockwell and Vin Scully, and the way it is to be understood. Some of the revisionist criticism on Rockwell applies to the work of Vin Scully, and to dismiss any potential thought that Scully offers any easy sentimentalism.
The following observations were made about Rockwell, but most fittingly apply to Scully.
Karal Ann Marling says that “there is a light that sanctifies an ordinary day and reminds us how strange and sweet this life can be.” Scully’s work does that.
Her understandings of Rockwell fit Scully, “a belief that democracy must work, that all of us have been created equal.” Scully’s background biographies of each player are a testament to the diversity, the equality, the democracy.
Neil Harris says about Rockwell, and it applies to Scully, that he “projects a series of decencies expected that form part of the foundation for any civil society.” Scully’s seeming sentiment is more accurately seen as a hope for civility. Harris also notes that, “no one…is ever really lost to good possibilities.” In describing an opposing pitcher, “Boomer” Wells, Scully reveled in describing what a character he is, but in case anyone were to misunderstand his description, Scully ended it by saying that perhaps Boomer’s best friend in baseball was former Dodger legend Kirk Gibson. It was one of many examples of Scully celebrating “democracy and the individual, with all his virtues and foibles” and as Maureen Hennessey also observes, “the universal humanity that his (Rockwell, Scully) work communicates.” Scully especially appreciated the year the Dodger starting pitchers were all five from different countries.
Anyone who would pigeon-hole Scully as only a perpetrator of traditional values simply is not paying careful attention. Scully loves the characters, whether Mickey Hatcher, Jose Lima, Boomer Wells, Kirk Gibson, Dontrelle Willis. As suggested by Hennessey about Rockwell (p125), “thus those who look for traditional values…will find a virtual cornucopia of difference and disobedience to which (Rockwell) invariably suggested that we respond with tolerance.” This speaks equally true of Vin Scully.
Scully, like Rockwell, does implicitly and occasional explicitly desire “a morality that yearns above all for goodness to trump evil.” (Laurie Norton)
As suggested by the vast amount of metaphor and imagery Scully uses about both work and combat, Scully’s sentiment is contextualized. While is has been popular in recent criticism to separate form from content, there is still a defense for a relationship between the two. Scully’s called ball games implicitly and explicitly suggest the qualities necessary for a democracy, especially tolerance. Thus the sentiment towards children and family is always in the context of characters who are redeemable, ball players who were fortunate enough to escape poverty, injury, illness, and a ball game whose central metaphors are work and combat. Neither Scully’s world (nor Rockwell’s) is simplistic or idyllic.
In this presumably post-modern, or post-post modern world does such a moral stance that may otherwise seem old fashioned undermine the purity of his art? A moot point. The intention is to answer that question in the next chapter, Chapter Ten.