A “Marvelous” Bit Of Editing?

How MLB (or Fox) Chose To Present Scully’s Hank Aaron Call

Look, the 2025 All Star Game was a hit. We had the NL grabbing an improbable, quick lead off Tarik Skubal—for the nerds out there, the first two hits barely cleared 72 and 43 mph exit velocities—and in a bit of symmetry the AL tied it in the 9th on a Steven Kwan 54 mph dribbler. The game was ultimately decided by an aesthetically pleasing and surprising dinger-off capped by a trio of Schwarbombs.

In between, during the 7th inning stretch, MLB and Fox paid tribute to Hank Aaron and his record-breaking 715th home run, hit in April of 1974. Using projection mapping—essentially holograms mixed with film footage—they recreated Aaron at the plate, his swing, the trot around the bases, and even shot off a rocket to represent the ball’s flight to left center field. It looked amazing, marvelous even.

They concurrently played the audio of Vin Scully’s famous call of Aaron breaking the record many believed would never be broken, Babe Ruth’s 714 career home run mark. It’s one of the, if not the, most famous calls in baseball history.

Did it sound off to you? Because there was one problem: MLB or Fox—it’s still not clear who made the decision—edited out the most important part of Scully’s call.

They played Scully exclaiming the hit itself, and “it’s a high fly to the deep left center field,” but after that came a telling omission. Scully had paused as he did so well, letting the crowd’s roar fill the space during Aaron’s victorious trot.

Then MLB/Fox played the rest. Well, most of it. Some of it. This is the full ending of Scully’s call:

The entire first sentence—“A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South”—was not played.

Instead they started with, “What a marvelous moment for baseball,” et cetera. The historical whitewashing problem is obvious, but even on the basis of simple syntactical context, they wiped away the predicate describing why it was a “marvelous moment.”

Breaking the record is clearly a major achievement, but the accomplishment alone is not the most noteworthy thing about it. Aaron’s 715 came less than a decade after MLK’s march to Montgomery, less than a decade after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed to address—though they hardly solved—discriminatory barriers black folks faced to working and voting, especially in the south.

Aaron personally faced unbelievable pressures and indignities as the milestone drew closer, including death threats to himself, his wife, and his family. At one point the FBI even advised him not to play. Scully later explained his thinking at the time he called Aaron’s 715:

“Greatest impact sociologically.” Historically. We have always had a good deal of running away from certain uncomfortable truths about this country, but the particular forced ignorance around racial experiences has made an especially vigorous comeback lately.

There’s a further dark irony to the way Scully’s call was edited at this particular game, at this particular stadium. The All Star Game was scheduled for Atlanta in 2021, but MLB pulled it and gave hosting duties to Colorado following passage of Georgia’s “Election Integrity Act” that year. The new law was viewed by civil rights advocates as an attempt to intentionally weaken the federal Voting Rights Act’s protections for minorities, by making it more difficult to vote absentee, to require higher identification standards, and to access ballot boxes.

The MLBPA also objected to the new law, and MLB moved the 2021 game. Rob Manfred made grave statements about principles.

That issue garnered nary a mention during the lead up to this ASG. The Georgia law is still in force (though legal challenges are winding through various courts). The show, of course, went on.

We do not need a deep investigation to divine the reason why MLB and Fox might cut Scully’s celebration of a “black man getting a standing ovation in the Deep South,” and thereby eliminate the historical context of the moment.

Earlier this year, the new administration took down Jackie Robinson’s page on the Department of Defense website, replacing it with a likely automatic but nonetheless absurd “DEI” url link. That page was only restored after massive fan protest.

Not long after that, the president met with Manfred to discuss “issues pertaining to baseball.” You know about Pete Rose, but there was another change soon after that few probably noticed.

Each MLB team has its own home page within the larger league site. If you had checked the drop-down menus for each team even last year, a majority of them would have contained a link highlighting that team’s DEI initiatives.

If you check now, they are all gone. All except one. The only organization that still features such a link on its site is the Dodgers, the team for which Vin Scully called games for 67 years.