Smith modestly ends the list at 14, but you have the sense he would have been happy to add another 30.

In a previous book about baseball broadcasting, "Voices of Summer," in which Smith ranks baseball's all-time announcers, he puts Scully No. 1.

That's not the surprising part.

The surprising part comes when in his grading of 10 areas for each broadcaster, with each area getting a maximum of 10 points, Smith judged Scully perfect in every area.

Scully scored 100 points on a 100-point scale.

By Smith's reckoning, Scully has no weaknesses as a broadcaster.

"Honesty compels me to say he does not have a flaw," Smith said during a telephone interview on Thursday. "He should. Nobody should be the perfect craftsman. But I would suggest he is. He was the best there ever was."

Among the qualities Smith lists about what sets Scully apart, there's affinity, proportion, reliability, credibility, knowledge, discipline, wearability and history.

Perhaps above all his gifts is Scully's use of language.

"He plays the English language like Jascha Heifetz did the violin," Smith said. "This is not my view alone. The American Sportscasters Association this year named him overwhelmingly the top sportscaster, not simply baseball broadcaster, of all time.

"No one has as seamlessly wed anecdote and play-by-play, in any sport," Smith said. "He has done it now for 60 straight years. He is 81 years old, which seems impossible if you listen to him on XM Satellite. His ability to turn a phrase, to give a telling fact, to etch a winning anecdote, is incomparable. None of it is preplanned. As a former speechwriter, I'm well conversant with writers who prepare spontaneous lines weeks ahead of the fact. That's not true with him. It's all off the top of his head."

Over the years, with his sense of modesty and privacy, Scully has said he would never write a book about his life or collaborate with someone else or even approve an authorized biography.

He made no exception for Smith.

But Smith reasoned that he could not write about the history of baseball broadcasting without considering the life of its greatest practitioner. Smith said writing about baseball broadcasting without writing a biography about Scully would be like writing about popular music and ignoring Frank Sinatra. It can't be done.

"I think the clincher came in the late '80s and early '90s, thinking about this, I began to talk to people about Scully," Smith said. "Mel Allen, Red Barber, Harry Caray, Lindsey Nelson, Jerry Doggett, his longtime partner, Bob Prince, Ernie Harwell. I asked them, who's the best there ever was? Immediately, without even thinking, each of those people said Scully."