Nobody in the Twins organization was closer to the late Herb Carneal than Tom Mee, who has worked for the team from the day it moved here in 1961 from Washington, D.C. -- first as public relations director and now as the official scorekeeper.
Carneal, the voice of the Twins for 45 years, died Sunday morning of heart failure.
Mee had spoken to Carneal on Saturday morning.
"He told me he was not that excited to see me because he just felt his voice and condition wasn't strong enough," Mee said. "He said he'd wait until he felt his voice was stronger and then he'd come back [to the broadcast booth]. I guess it was more than his voice that wasn't operating up to par, but it's too bad -- great guy."
Mee said that Carneal seemed confident he would be back in the booth this year, but he had said that for now, " 'I just don't think I can give the job what I need to give it, and I don't want to give them a less than total effort.' "
Mee recalled how the brewery that was sponsoring the games in Baltimore gave up the broadcasts in 1962, prompting Bob Wolff to join Madison Square Garden's sports broadcasts and do NBC's baseball game of the week and Carneal to join Ray Scott and Halsey Hall in Twins broadcasts.
"He was straight arrow," Mee said of Carneal. "You could rely on him to the utmost. He would always come through for you."
Longtime Baltimore and Detroit baseball broadcaster Ernie Harwell was Carneal's mentor, Mee said. "They were with Baltimore in the mid-'50s, and he kind of broke Herb in, and Herb really thought the world of Ernie."
As a broadcaster, Mee said Carneal didn't didn't give you a lot of fluff, kept listeners focused on the game and he followed the ball.
I had a good relationship with Carneal, and over the years we often had lunch or dinner together at the Metrodome where media people are fed. We were good friends.
Carneal was not the type to whom you could tell a lot of stories. But he got a lot of laughs from Hall, a real character and longtime broadcasting partner.
Carneal once recalled one of the zanier incidents: "We had a doubleheader in Chicago one Sunday. In the second game, I had the first half of the play-by-play. The booth was kind of small, so when we got to the middle of the game I moved into the main press box to make room for [broadcaster Merle Harmon].
"A couple of innings later I look over, and it looks like there is smoke coming out of the booth. I hear this commotion and run over there, and here are Merle and Halsey trying to stomp out this fire. There was all this ticker tape with the scores of the other games on the floor, and Halsey had flicked some of his cigar ashes on that ticker tape and set it on fire. He had a sport coat on the back of his chair, and about half of that was burned up."
When Hall returned home, he was given an asbestos coat by 3M.
There were other laughs in the booth on Bat Day when the fans would bounce the bats on the steel floor at Metropolitan Stadium, convincing Hall that the radio booth was going to collapse. Carneal had to scream to describe the game while Hall went out of his mind.
Hall gave Carneal, and many of us, a lot of laughs.
One reason the players respected Carneal is that none of their girlfriends or wives who listened to the broadcast would ever hear Carneal criticize a player. He would tell what happened and let the radio listeners decide on their own.
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