Competing legends

Two of the greatest announcers of all time, Dick Enberg and Vin Scully, announced that next baseball season will be their final baseball seasons.

Scully is only the greatest baseball announcer ever invented, and that comes even from people who announce baseball for a living. Scully started announcing Brooklyn Dodgers games in 1950 at 22, then got the Dodgers’ top job in 1954, essentially because of an attack of the ego of Scully’s broadcasting mentor, Red Barber.

Barber had announced a number of World Series until then. In those days the World Series teams’ principal announcer would announce the World Series on the national radio network carrying the World Series — first, Mutual, then NBC. The announcers, however, were paid by Gillette, the principal sponsor, and Gillette paid World Series announcers $200 per game for the biggest annual sporting event of the entire country.

Barber decided he wanted more money, and when Gillette declined to pay him more, Barber declined to announce the 1953 World Series. And then the Dodgers declined to offer him a contract for the 1954 season, making Scully, now all the way up to 26, the team’s principal announcer.

Scully has announced all of the Brooklyn and then Los Angeles Dodgers’ World Series wins and every postseason game (when allowed to under national TV and radio rights) since then. He balanced Dodgers work with coverage of NFL football, golf and tennis for CBS-TV, and even a game show and a talk show. If you were creating a baseball announcer, you’d create Scully.

Scully came to L.A. from Brooklyn. Enberg came to L.A. from Armada, Mich. In fact, Enberg came to California to be a university physical education professor and maybe broadcast sports on the side. It turned out that broadcasting sports paid better and probably was more fun, so Prof. Enberg moved into L.A. TV and radio, announcing the Los Angeles/California Angels, the Los Angeles Rams, and UCLA basketball during the John Wooden dynasty (which is how he got noticed nationally; he announced the first nationally syndicated telecast of a regular-season college basketball game, UCLA and Houston at the Houston Astrodome in 1968).

Enberg isn’t known as much as a baseball announcer in part because he announced for southern California’s second baseball team, the Angels, which were considerably less successful than the Dodgers, and in part because he stopped announcing baseball regularly when NBC Sports hired him. Enberg did some NBC Saturday doubleheader games, and did four sets of postseason games, two involving the Dodgers and one involving the Angels.

Enberg also announced one World Series, the 1982 Suds Series between the Brewers and the Cardinals. (Who announced the Series for CBS Radio? Scully, of course.) Even though Enberg is my favorite sports announcer of all time, I grew to dislike his World Series work only because it seemed that every time he was doing play-by-play, good things were happening for the Cardinals and not the Brewers.

Enberg was the number one sports announcer for NBC throughout the 1980s, doing the NFL, Wimbledon tennis, golf and (until CBS got the contract in 1982) NCAA basketball. Enberg, Billy Packer and Al McGuire made up a legendary trio when three-man booths are opportunities for one announcer to step on the others.

Even though Scully was never CBS’ number one NFL announcer, he often got postseason assignments. He never got to announce a Super Bowl, but he and Enberg did work on the same day:

Enberg replaced Curt Gowdy as NBC’s lead NFL announcer. Enberg also wanted to be NBC’s lead baseball announcer, but when CBS decided to not name Scully its lead NFL announcer (where he would have worked with John Madden; Pat Summerall was retained in that role instead), Scully went to NBC to announce baseball. That resulted in Gowdy’s replacement, Joe Garagiola, being moved to color; Garagiola’s previous partner, Milwaukee native Tony Kubek, moving to the number two team with Bob Costas; and Enberg being moved out of baseball.