Mr. Scully hit one home run as a college baseball player, an inside-the-park variety, against City College. But he flourished as a broadcaster for the Fordham radio station, WFUV, working basketball and football games and, in his senior year, also calling baseball, having left the team after two seasons so he could get behind the microphone.
After graduating in 1949, Mr. Scully worked as a fill-in at WTOP, the CBS affiliate in Washington, broadcasting sports, news and weather. On a visit to the CBS offices in New York that July he was introduced to Barber, who was in charge of sports for CBS Radio in addition to broadcasting Dodger games.
When Ernie Harwell, one of Barber’s partners on Dodger broadcasts, was reassigned from broadcasting a Boston University-Maryland football game at Fenway Park on the afternoon of Nov. 12, 1949, Mr. Barber checked WTOP for references on Mr. Scully and, satisfied with what he learned, assigned him to do the game in Boston.
Mr. Scully got the news from his mother.
“I came home to our apartment one day in New York,” he remembered. “She was so excited and flustered. She said, ‘You’ll never guess who called — Red Skelton!’ And I said, ‘No, you must mean Red Barber.’”
There was, Mr. Scully later recalled, no room for him in the Fenway Park press box. “I had to walk along the right-field roof, following the play,” The Boston Globe quoted him as saying.
Mr. Barber heard a recording of the broadcast, liked what he heard, and assigned Mr. Scully to the Harvard-Yale game the next week.
