Former WBAL-TV sportscaster Vince Bagli, who became known as the “Dean of Baltimore Sports” in nearly five decades on air, died at age 93. His death was caused by complications from a pulmonary embolism, said his son Vince Bagli Jr., of Baltimore.
“I really think I’m an extension of the fans,” he said in a 1988 Sunday Sun Magazine profile as reported in the Baltimore Sun obituary. “I started out being a fan. I say a lot of things you hear in the barber shop or drugstore or the checkout counter in the supermarket. I probably know a little more because I am closer to it and have been paying attention to it as a profession for a long time. But I started out a fan and in a lot of ways, I am still that same fan.”
Along with the professional sports scores, Mr. Bagli took pride in delivering the results of every local high school football game on Friday nights and name-dropping the players who had made big contributions, his son said.
“From the start, Bagli’s delivery of the sports news has been unusual. While most other sportscasters work from prepared scripts from which they rarely deviate, Bagli prefers to look directly into the camera,” observed The Sun Magazine profile. “His scripts include perhaps as much as one complete sentence on a story he will talk about.”
It was no secret that Mr. Bagli loathed teleprompters and battled with studio executives over his unhappiness with them.
“Take a look at the people who use them, and you tell me if they are as credible as somebody who just looks at you and talks,” he said in the 1988 article.
The broadcaster spent 31 of his 46 years on air at WBAL-TV before retiring in 1995.
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