Never mind the honeyed delivery, the wit or the accumulated baseball wisdom. For all his various and sundry broadcasting gifts, Vin Scully was blessed, above all, with exquisite timing. “He may have called baseball games all those years, but he would have been a wonderful conductor or musician,” says Al Michaels, a Scully protégé dating back to his Brooklyn boyhood. “He just has this intuition for the rhythm of a game.”
The running joke was that baseball waited for Scully, not the other way around. “If Vin was in the middle of an anecdote and it was a 2–2 count,” says Ted Robinson, a longtime MLB announcer, “you could be sure the batter would foul off the next pitch, just to be sure Vin would get through his story.