By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

A lot of Reds fans walked around Friday looking as if they were about to lose their best friend.

When Joe Nuxhall announced Friday - 36 years after he started in the Reds' broadcast booth and 58 years after he became the youngest player to appear in a Major League Baseball game at 15 - that he would retire for good after the 2004 Reds season, Reds fans started feeling the loss.

"Joe is the Reds," said John Ralston of Westwood, as he leaned on the counter at the Skywalk Baseball Card shop on Vine Street Friday afternoon.

"He is the original nice guy; the guy everybody loves," said Mr. Ralston, under a glass case full of autographed baseball bats - one of them a Joe Nuxhall model.

Owner Helen Thomas agreed.

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Listen to some of Joe Nuxhall's memorable radio moments at 700wlw.com

"Joe is Joe; he is the gentle giant," Thomas said. "You can replace him with a body, but you can never replace him. He's an original."

One of Ohio's highest-profile Reds fans, U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, got a tour of Great American Ball Park on Friday. Mr. DeWine, who has been a Reds season-ticket holder for decades, said Nuxhall is linked to some of the senator's earliest memories of baseball.

"He's been a part of people's lives for so long around here; everyone thinks of him as a personal friend," DeWine said.

Some in the Tristate - especially in his hometown of Hamilton - have called Nuxhall a friend even before he became a famous ballplayer and broadcaster.

Don Briede of Fairfield was a young Marine just back to his hometown of Hamilton from the service in 1946 when the local Moose Lodge asked him to form a baseball team.

His left-handed pitcher was a high school senior named Joe Nuxhall, and Briede was his catcher.

"He had a beautiful fastball and a beautiful curve ball, but he was wild as a March hare," Briede said. "He threw as hard back then as he did in the major leagues."

George Jonson, a Hamilton attorney, graduated from Hamilton High School five years behind Nuxhall. As a boy, he remembers watching the young Nuxhall boy play baseball, basketball and football at Hamilton's senior and junior high schools.

"He's not changed a bit, after all these years," Jonson said. "Still talks to everybody he meets. Still takes the time to do something for others. He's just a good man."

For Greg Rhodes, a Cincinnati author and baseball historian, Nuxhall, with more than 50 years in the Reds organization, is the "living bridge" to baseball's "glory days" of the 1940s and '50s.

"He is the repository, the unbroken link to that time," Rhodes said. "Who else can you think who goes so far back and has seen so much? And he is not just a figure of the past. He's part of the game as it is today."

For many of Nuxhall's fans, one of his most endearing qualities is his reluctance to criticize players, his reverence for baseball tradition and his unrestrained and unshakeable optimism.

"He hardly ever gets mad," Ralston said.

"The only time I remember him getting really mad on the air was this year when (Reds manager Bob) Boone called a suicide squeeze on a 2-and-0 count. Joe couldn't believe it.

"But the only reason he got mad is because that's not the way the game is supposed to be played.

"He loves baseball. And we love him."