Vin Scully always knew what to say and when not to say anything at all

It was Game 1 of the 1988 World Series and Kirk Gibson had just hit a home run with a small hit. The Los Angeles Dodgers, considered underdogs against the powerful Oakland Athletics, rushed to home plate to greet Gibson, who was unavailable due to injuries in both legs.

In the broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, Vin Scully sat at the microphone. The words he found were perfect – even poetic.

“In a year that was so unlikely, the impossible happened,” he said.

The call would stand as perhaps the most iconic of his 67 years in the cabin. But what preceded it was also significant for Scully, who died Tuesday at the age of 94: 67 seconds of silence.

“That’s really my trademark,” Scully later said. “Day after day, week after week. If something happens and the crowd roars, I’ll shut up.”

Of course, he also took a lot of time for discussions. As a speaker, Scully’s style was elegant and talkative – even funny (“Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost,” he once said. “For support, not enlightenment”). Anyone listening could sense his love for the game and the curiosity that drove him to uncover the stories he would slowly but surely share with his audience.

Over the years, he’s credited some of the greatest moments in baseball history, but his legacy extends far beyond any single achievement or moment. What is most notable about Scully is the way he has endeared himself to generations of baseball fans not just in Brooklyn and Los Angeles but throughout the sport.

Born on November 27, 1927 in the Bronx, he grew up a fan of the New York Giants and occasionally attended games at the Polo Grounds. After spending two years in the Navy, he attended Fordham University where he played some baseball and began his broadcasting career, calling football, basketball and baseball games for the university station WFUV.

Shortly after graduating, Scully got a job at CBS radio to cover college football, but it wasn’t long before he focused on baseball again. In 1950 he joined Red Barber and Connie Desmond on the Brooklyn Dodgers radio and television crew. By 1953, he was the Dodgers’ premier broadcaster. When the Dodgers faced the New York Yankees in the World Series that fall, Scully became the youngest person to ever broadcast a World Series game.

By this point, Scully had already developed his own way of bringing the game closer to his audience.

“The game is just a long conversation, and I’m expecting that, and I’m going to say things like, ‘Did you know that?’ or ‘You’re probably wondering why,'” he once explained. “I’m really just chatting instead of just playing game after game.”

When the Dodgers moved west in 1958, Scully went with them. Over the coming decades, he named thousands of games that would soon be forgotten and a few destined for the history books. Some of his more memorable calls include: Sandy Koufax’s four no-hitters, Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run, Bill Buckner’s mistake in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, and Gibson’s famous home run in 1988.

“It may sound cheesy,” Koufax once said, “but I almost enjoyed listening to a game of Vin more than playing it.”

In 1982, Scully won the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame for his contributions to the game as a broadcaster. Years later, in 2016, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

But even as the awards piled up and Scully aged well into her eighties, he continued to broadcast. The longevity that made him so popular with fans impressed other broadcast veterans like Jerry Howarth. Early in his career, the longtime Blue Jays broadcaster was so impressed with Scully’s sense of fairness that he went out of his way to introduce himself. Howarth immediately found Scully to be unusually friendly and the two stayed in touch over the years.

Decades later, long after the now-retired Howarth had become a fixture on the Blue Jays broadcast booth, he could only marvel at Scully’s staying power. Driving home from the stadium late one night in the season, a realization hit him.

“After turning 33, I give myself a mental pat on the back for another year,” Howarth recalled. “And I’m leaving, ’33! Vin Scully did twice as much. He’s been broadcasting for 66 years!’”

In 2016, after 67 seasons of airing Dodgers Baseball, Scully retired at the age of 88. The voice that had told the story of the Dodgers for decades would no longer air nightly from spring to fall.

But the next time a station goes silent and lets the game audio take over for a moment, you might hear an echo from Scully. As he once said, “The roar of the crowd has always been the sweetest music. It’s intoxicating.”