THE VOICE:

First and foremost comes his love of language, born of being a Literature major at Fordham. An American poet once called Scully "our Yeats," and another writer has compared him to Homer. Both are certainly exaggerations, but what bounty came from frustration, both in poetry and baseball. Scully was a no-stick center fielder at Fordham, and, hanging up his cleats at age 20, he decided "to talk a good game."

That he did. Out came cascading metaphors ("the butter-and-egg man"), internal rhyme (a line drive "whacked into the gap"), euphony, electric verbs, alliteration ("a lamb chop to a lion" for a perfectly centered 3-0 pitch to a home run hitter), allusions to poets like Pope and Shakespeare, and personifications of everything from dirt clods to a lazily hit ball ("a room-service fly"). Scully's elephantine memory of the history of the game intertwined with the high and low points of the country is certainly unprecedented and will probably never be duplicated. His sheer love of the game, of doing what he is doing, and the excitement in his voice climbs right along with the ball. Scully rarely refers to the Dodgers as "we." He brings to his enthusiasm a hard-nosed journalist's objectivity and preparation, one reason why his call is treasured across the nation.

Then there's the music. The Los Angeles Times columnist Chris Erskine (no relation to Carl) recently compared Scully's voice to a horn that can "make musical the specter of grown men mostly standing around for three hours," and that contains such elements as "swing, moxie, and sonic opulence." The University of Southern California professor Jeffrey Allen describes the voice as "a virtuoso instrument."

Scully would probably run for the nearest beer at such dissection, but the USC musicologist Chris Sampson insists that the voice "starts with a dominant chord (that) has some tension to it that's leading to a resolution." (He has actually done sheet music on the last out call of the 1965 Sandy Koufax perfect game: "Two and two to Harvey Kuenn. One strike away.") It scans poetically, too--trochaic pentameter actually--urgent, even insistent, with a double-stressed spondee ("One strike") before ending with a teasing iamb, keeping us hanging in the air. Sampson calls this unconscious music Scully's "claw mark"--what makes Sinatra Sinatra, Lennon Lennon, Flack Flack--and no one else.

The Voice has been more than mimetic--it has catalyzed, and not just fans. Angelenos never tire of the myth of Kirk Gibson, the crippled Dodger who hobbled off the bench in the last inning of the first game of the 1988 World Series--angered at hearing Scully's radio voice in the locker room attesting that he would "not see any action tonight, for sure." Gibson hit a stumbling, one-handed home run to win the game, rounding the bases while cocking the air as if it were a rifle. "In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened," Scully exclaimed, after 67 seconds of silence, or rather crowd roar. In a crazy sort of way, Scully had goaded, even caused Gibson's heroics.

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