No inside knowledge, but Scott's no-hitter had Elston saying "There it is" and letting the crowd noise tell the story. Milo basically took an air-check to McMullen and told him how horrible the call was. He supposedly had been doing the same thing all season.
Milo probably had a prolix, pleonastic, magnani-ificient call for the occasion he'd been working on for months, on the off chance Scott tossed a no-hitter in late September to clinch the division. I read that he worked on his '715' call for quite awhile, refining it meticulously, before the event ever actually took place. Nothing wrong with that - good job preparation, if nothing else. Of course, Milo delivered his lines it as if they were spontaneous, and I am pretty sure most of his listeners, I assume he knew, took them as if they were.
I remember Elston's call, or lack thereof, at the end of Scott's no-no. He had done basically the same thing at the finish of the one-game playoff for the NL West in LA at the end of the 1980 season. Two outs, bottom of the ninth, and the Astros were in control. As Dave Bergman eased over from 1st base to snag the pop-up that would end that season’s 163rd game, Gene Elston said, "That's it!" And then he was silent. There weren't many screaming Astros fans to listen to among the throng of front-runners in Chavez Ravine that day, but I guessed at the time Elston knew there were plenty of screaming Astros fans in bars and living rooms all across Houston and the surrounding areas. Instead of trying to leave his imprint on history, he just sat back and let us have our moment.
In his day, Gene Elston wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, by the way. There were people who preferred Loel Passe’s hokey, down-home, Southern country-boy style, and thought Passe should have been the lead (Passe was, in real life, very smart; he also liked his bourbon, and was reportedly quite the ladies man.) Harry Kalas had to go to Philadelphia to be top dog, and there were people at the time who thought the wrong guy left.
Also, I'd like to dissuade a seemingly commonly held notion nowadays about Gene Elston’s announcing style. He was NOT a stoic, non-emotive broadcaster most of the time. Go back and listen to some of his air checks. He was regularly quite animated, did on air commercials, had dumb interviews with broadcast booth interlopers, participated in mindless banter with the other announcers to kill air time, etc. At the end of Dierker's no-hitter in 1976, Elston was quite animated on the air. That no-hitter clinched nothing, and perhaps he realized Dierker’s singular effort itself was the whole story that day, and decided to celebrate it. Whereas with the Scott no-no, there was also the clinching of the NL West. What was Elston going to say then that most of us didn't already know? The litany of Astros failures over the years was carved as deeply into our hearts and minds as anything else we’d ever known. Elston realized that last ground-out would release a great deal of pent-up emotion, and so he just let it happen. I remember thinking at the time his restraint was quite appropriate. The screaming of the 30,000 or so fans in the Dome and of many times 30,000 fans wherever the rest of us were watching that game was as eloquent as anything he or certainly Milo could have come up with to mark the moment. Thank goodness Milo did not have the mike in his hands at the time.
Both Milo and Elston have/had their strong points, and their weaknesses. Personally, there are things I like and dislike about both of them, as announcers. The main difference between them, in my mind, is Elston had an idea about when to just shut the fuck up, the notion that, at times, what was going on the field or had just gone on needed no embellishment from him, and in fact would have been diminished by it.
As far as I can tell, Milo has never been troubled by such thoughts.
