Colin Sheridan: Scully transported us into the soul of America's pastime 

If there was one thing I learned that fall in Kabul, it was that a baseball inning will last just as long as it takes Vin Scully to say exactly what he has to say, and not a moment longer.

Former Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully speaks to fans before game two of the 2017 World Series between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

I spent my son's first birthday in a windowless, fortified concrete structure in Kabul. It was a tough day (relatively speaking, in the context of that apocalyptic place), for all the reasons you’d expect, but none more acute than the revelatory feeling that no vocation, no sense of duty, no professional ambition, no financial remuneration; none of it was worth the sacrifice of missing any birthday, let alone your oldest kids' first. 

It’s one thing to miss it for a World Cup final, or climbing Everest, or winning an All-Ireland but it’s quite another to miss it because of Osama Bin Laden's life choices. Yet, 14 years almost to the day after I watched the Twin Towers fall from the college bar in Galway, I sat there, in a soulless room, impossibly far away from home, staring at a tv screen and a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game, listening to - of all things - a commentator describe the ritual of fathers and sons going to ball games.