The jazz trumpeter Miles Davis is credited with saying that what matters most are not the notes a musician plays, but “the notes you don’t play.” Vin Scully, born one year after Davis, in 1927, seemed to grasp this concept. His signature call — the trademark of the sportscasting craft — was silence. It was not his call but the crowd’s that carried a game’s most important moments.

In an interview late in his career with the Dodgers, Scully traced the origin of this practice to his own childhood. Listening to games on the family radio in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, he remembered lying on the floor, allowing the sound of the crowd to “wash over” him through the speakers. Whether it was Kirk Gibson walking off Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series or Charlie Culberson walking off the Colorado Rockies in the Dodgers’ final home game of 2016, Scully observed his signature pause at the game’s critical moment. Silence was not merely integral to the tune Scully sang each night. It was a young boy paying forward a gift he received as a boy, every day of the baseball season, well past his own 88th birthday.

This is why it’s so difficult to disentangle Scully the person from Scully the craftsman: His genuine affection for the human