"My eyesight's great, as good as it's ever been," he says later. "That could have happened to me 25 years ago. Red Barber told me one time, he said, 'One time I got the wrong third baseman for Cincinnati. I'm doing Cincinnati games, I had the wrong third baseman in for the whole game. You know, he came to bat four times.' And I said, 'Well, if that happens to you, I'm not going to worry about what happens to me.'" Most people don't even notice the occasional mistakes, he says, so he doesn't dwell on them or apologize for them.

"He's as good as always," Price says, blaming Harwell's error on the difficulties of seeing in the twilight at Comerica Park. "All of us have problems sometimes with the glare. It's a hard glare." Dickerson agrees that Harwell sounds "exactly the same" as when Dickerson first heard him, as a little boy rooting for the 1968 championship team.

Harwell's certainly in good shape. He jumps rope and stretches every day, and sometimes jumps on a trampoline. He skips elevators too, instead walking the ballpark. "That gives you a little exercise you don't even know you're getting," he says. It also gives fans a chance to say hello or ask for an autograph.

"I followed him around yesterday," says Bill Eisner, a photographer for the team who's young enough to be Harwell's son, "and I was dying."

So why retire? A lot of baseball people are pushed out the door by travel fatigue, but Harwell loves the road. "When I started I knew I had to do it, so I figured I might as well do it cheerfully. The way I try to look at is, they're paying me to live in a nice hotel, eat good meals, and see my friends every day and go to ballgames," he says. "I love to read, and that occupies your time a lot. I don't mind it at all."

It's hard to nail Harwell down on a reason for his retirement other than his old radio joke and vague statements like "I didn't want to stay too long."

"He and I had always talked and he felt he could go another four or five years," says Price, who says he was "shattered" when Harwell told him of his retirement plans. Price says Harwell has never discussed his thinking with him. "Maybe it's just time," he says. "He's as good as always."

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

"Well, here we go, second inning, no score in this muscular soap opera from Comerica Park this evening."

In the bottom of the second inning Harwell gives the score -- nothing-nothing -- at 7:28, 7:29 and 7:30. He gives the score at 7:33 and 7:35 when the Tigers score single runs. He gives it again at 7:36, and then when the inning ends at 7:40.

Jon Miller, who announced for Baltimore in the American League before moving to San Francisco, says he used to use an egg-timer to remind himself to give the score, the way he'd read that Red Barber used to do. "Ernie saw that one day years ago, and he said, 'How long before that runs out?'" Miller says. "And I said, 'I don't know, I think two and a half minutes or three minutes.' He said, 'That's a good idea to keep giving the score. In fact I think you should give it probably once a minute.' And I thought, Once a minute? Wow. Wouldn't that seem like that's all you're ever doing is just giving the score? And Ernie says, 'Well, we all want to believe that everybody's listening to the whole broadcast and hanging on every word, but the reality is that that's not the case. Most people are tuning in and out at random at any time. And the first thing they want to know is, What's the score?'"

Miller says this simple thought might account for Harwell's popularity.

"On top of his talent, his great voice, the warmth that he projects, the genuine person that he is, which comes across on the air, that may be one of the great reasons why they loved him so much in Detroit, and even the listeners weren't aware of that. Because I think your first reaction when you turn on the radio and you're in the car: What's the score? And if the guy doesn't give you the score, you're angry. Hey! Gimme the score! What's the score, for god's sakes? Well then I realized, hey, no matter who's tuning in when, Ernie's giving them the score almost immediately.

"He also told me that he never told a story that he couldn't fit in between pitches or between batters. If it took longer to tell that story than that, it was too long for the broadcast. And again, I sort of disputed that notion, but then as I saw how popular he was in Detroit, I thought, Well, that has to be part of it too."

Miller says Harwell is always thinking, "What I need to do here is provide this service for the fans."

That generosity extends not just to fans but to other broadcasters as well, particularly young ones. "I'm not much on giving advice," Harwell says, "but if a guy comes up to me and wants to talk, that's fine. Love to. Kids send me tapes all the time from places like, you know, Ada, Oklahoma, or Des Moines, Iowa, or somewhere like that, and I'll listen to the tape and give them a little critique."

One of those kids, in the late '80s, was Dickerson, now a booth partner. Harwell invited the young broadcaster, at the time a mere acquaintance, out to his house. "We sat at his kitchen table and listened," Dickerson says, "and it wasn't some perfunctory 'That's pretty good.' He really listened. He'd say, 'Now, you just said a pitch was down low. You don't have to use the word down and the word low. Just say low.'" Dickerson still has his notes from the session.

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

"We didn't get hit hard by the storm," Price is saying on the air about the overnight rain, "how about you?"

"We didn't get hit too hard. We lost our power for about 12 hours," Harwell says.

"You didn't have to replace any of Miss Lulu's rosebushes or anything?"

"Not yet."

"Miss Lulu" is the former Lulu Tankersley, Mrs. Harwell since 1941. To Tigers fans, she's more of an offstage character than a real person, akin to Charlie Brown's Little Red-Haired Girl. (Suggest this notion to Harwell and he says, "She's a character, all right.") The broadcast-booth version of Miss Lulu is forever fussing over her rosebushes and cracking the whip on poor hapless Ernie.

They met at a dance when he was at Emory University and she was a year behind him at Brenau College, a women's school down the road in Gainesville, Ga. She followed him from Atlanta to Marines postings in South Carolina, North Carolina -- where they lived in a house with no electricity -- and Washington, and to baseball jobs in New York, Baltimore and Detroit. "She's been a great support for me," he says. "Probably the best thing that ever happened to me was hooking up with her."

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