"It was a traumatic experience," he says. "You know, nobody likes to be told he can't do the job. But I don't think I got as excited as other people did. I looked at it as a business proposition. A guy hires you, he's got a right to fire you."

The fans didn't see it that way. The fans hit the fan. Bo Schembechler, the former University of Michigan football coach who was now the president of the Tigers, was widely perceived as the man behind the decision to fire Harwell. Once a revered figure in the state, he now got hate mail by the truckful and was eviscerated in the press. Fans besieged the team and the station with phone calls and boycotted Domino's Pizza, the chain owned by Tigers owner Tom Monaghan.

"I was flabbergasted by the reaction that it caused," Harwell says. "I thought there'd be a little ripple, maybe somebody'd call the ballpark, say, 'Who was that guy who used to do the game?' and stuff like that. Well, maybe a little more than that."

Harwell won't quite admit that the uproar was caused by a deep and abiding love for him among Tigers fans.

"I think there were a lot of angles," he says. "The announcer is here for years and people get used to him, number one. It's sort of a tribute to radio and baseball more so than the guy. And then I think, too, I was, if you'll pardon the expression, a poster boy for old age. You know, I was discriminated against because of my age and sort of the American throwaway-trash society. 'He's through. Let's dump this guy.' I had a lot of people at General Motors and Ford telling me, 'That happened to me. I don't like it either, but you hang in there,' and so forth. I think they identified with me because of that too."

Harwell played out his lame-duck year, then spent 1992 freelancing for CBS Radio and the California Angels. The Tigers, meanwhile, were bought by yet another pizza man, Mike Ilitch of Little Caesar's, who promptly hired Harwell back.

Harwell says the whole incident is forgotten, but he's never patched it up with Schembechler. "I tried to with Bo but he always resisted, so I finally gave up," he says. "I don't hold a grudge at all. My feeling was that it was a business deal. Everybody's forgiven, it happened, it's over."

After one year in the radio booth, Harwell switched to television in 1994, then returned to radio, his first love, in 1999. "When I was on TV, you know, I was on TV four or five years here without doing radio, and people would come up to me and say, 'What are you doing these days? Sorry you're not working anymore,'" he says. "Radio's got a great advantage because people can take it everywhere."

"He comes from an era that we're losing," says Mike Shannon, a former St. Louis Cardinals player who's been broadcasting Cards game for 31 years, mostly alongside Jack Buck, who died this summer. "We're losing the era of all the great television men that we've known through the past -- I'm talking about the Vin Scullys, and the list goes on and on -- they all started in radio. And until you do baseball on radio, I don't think you can fully understand it."

Television has replaced radio as the main way fans keep up with the home team. Instead of a handful of televised games a year, there are hundreds. And announcers aren't as important on television.

"It's a director's medium," Harwell says. "The director decides what's going to happen. On the radio, you know, we always say nothing happens until we say it does."

Also, where there were once 16 teams with two or three announcers each, now there are 30 teams with maybe a half dozen announcers each, not to mention the national television crews.

"It used to be when we started, we were the only game in town, and if you wanted to hear a game you tuned in on Harry Caray or Jack Buck or whoever," Harwell says, though matter-of-factly, not complaining. "Now you've got ESPN and Fox throwing games all over. You see them all the time. You're bombarded with all kinds of announcers, and I think it's just harder now for a guy to make an impact. It's sheer numbers if nothing else."

That Harwell has made an impact is clear from the constant stream of interviewers and autograph seekers he greets each day, from the piles of mail that the Tigers public relations department filters, lest he wear himself out fulfilling every request for a meeting, a favor, a personal phone call. As he walks around the ballpark, which he does a lot, people shout his name, ask him for autographs, want to shake his hand. He accommodates them all, and seems to believe this: "It's not me. It's the position more than it is me."

"I think that's true humbleness," says his wife, Lulu. "He doesn't know why people feel that way."

Dickerson, who shares play-by-play duties, marvels at the fact that Harwell never seems to get tired of the fuss people make over him.

"That's the amazing thing. You'd think at some point you'd see him go, 'I'll get ya later,'" Dickerson says, laughing at the very thought of a Harwell brush-off. "Never. We were in Florida, you know, there's about 200 people in the stands before the game, there's nobody there. And somebody goes, 'Ernie!' Yelling up from the stands. 'Can you sign my book?' And he goes, 'I'll be right down!' He left the booth! He went down, met the guy on the concourse. I've never seen him lose patience or get tired of it or even in a private moment say, 'For God sakes, is it ever gonna ...?' Not once."

"I like the attention," Harwell says. "I'm like anybody else. I like the people to make over me a little bit. It's nice. But I know deep down, it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is my relationship with God. That's got to come first."

Harwell became a born-again Christian in 1961, at a Billy Graham Crusade in Florida during spring training.

"I'm just a believer, you know. I'm a sinner like everybody else, but I just try to do the best I can. He takes care of me, that's the main thing. I don't worry about anything."

Price says that Harwell, who has been active in an organization called Baseball Chapel, doesn't proselytize, but did help him spiritually after Price's son Jackson, 7, was diagnosed as autistic. "We were bitter, you know: Why's this happening, why did this happen to me? Why did this happen to us? And I had watched Ernie for a long time, how he handled things. You know, when he was fired by whoever fired him, the Tigers or WJR, I know that was devastating, but he told me he forgave those people. I watched how he operated, how he handled himself as a Christian. And I wanted to know more answers, why we would be given this delightful little boy and he was autistic. He never really said anything to me. We just started talking, and I just grew with him and then grew on my own."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Here's a little bump past the mound toward second base, Febles grabs it and, ah ... "

Harwell hesitates as Royals second baseman Carlos Febles fields a slow roller and throws to first to get Tigers leadoff hitter Ramon Santiago on a close play. Price softly says, "Just got him" at the same time that Harwell says, "Can't make the play."

Price says again, "Just got him, Ern," and Harwell says, "Yup." Price recaps the play and Harwell says, "So there's one up and one down" without missing a beat. His error isn't mentioned again.

Even the great ones make mistakes. Is Harwell, at 84, losing it?

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