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HERB CARNEAL: Well, hi, everybody. And a very pleasant good afternoon to you.

BILL CATLIN: The players, managers, color announcers, and even owners come and go at the Twins. But the voice of Herb Carneal has been describing their games for 26 years. It's almost a truism that people on the radio don't look like their listeners image of them.

But the tall, gentle Carneal seems to fit the steady, seasoned persona, his voice creates. Sitting at home in a bucolic edina setting, Carneal says radio was not his primary ambition.

HERB CARNEAL: As a kid, I wanted to be a Major League Baseball player, but I didn't have the ability to get to the major leagues. So the next best thing I thought would be able to go up there and to describe the game to the people in the vast, unseen audience out there.

BILL CATLIN: Like most ballplayers, he describes. Carneal got his start in the minor leagues in Springfield, Massachusetts, then off to Philadelphia and Baltimore. For five years, Carneal worked there with broadcasting Hall of Famer Ernie Harwell. Carneal says Harwell taught him a lot about sports broadcasting.

While announcers like Harry Caray in Chicago seem as much boosters as announcers, Carneal prefers to lay back. He compares his approach to officiating. The less he's noticed, the better he's doing, he says.

HERB CARNEAL: I do a game the way I would like to hear it or think I'd like to hear it. It's just basically a fundamental call of the ball game, not trying to get too fancy and not going overboard with editorializing, and second guessing, and so on, or try to manage from the booth or umpire from the booth or whatever.

Trying to get out of this two-out jam with Willie Wilson on second, Danny Tartabull on first, 1 ball and 2 strikes to Orta. The left-handed batter waiting. Blyleven throws to second, nobody covering and Wilson will go to third. He might try to score. He's going around third. They're going to wave him in. Here comes the throw. He is safe at home, and down to third base goes Tartabull.

Boy, you talk about speed. Bert Blyleven turned. Bert, I'm sure thought they had a timed pickoff play going.

Sometimes, you say, here I am, I'm a very mature man. And I'm sitting up there talking about a game. I said, I should be doing something more serious than this at my age. But then you'll get maybe two or three cards and letters from people that, well, they may be shut ins, or they may work on a farm, and they say that they just can't wait for the ballgame to start.

And I really enjoy it. And I just wanted to thank you for it. And I think that really gives you a little bit of satisfaction.

BILL CATLIN: It seems the ideal job for a baseball fan, getting paid to go to ball games and chat with the great players. But Carneal says, there's a lot more to it than ball games. He doesn't complain, but he says seven months of incessant travel and long hours make his job very much work, but less so during Florida spring training.

HERB CARNEAL: We don't do all the games in spring training. We do basically most of the weekend games. Down there, I enjoy just going out and watching a game. I don't know if I'd like to do it on a regular basis or not, but down there, things are very informal. I enjoy just going out and sitting there and watching the ball game.

BILL CATLIN: Asked if he's thinking about signing off for good soon, Carneal says, he's still enthusiastic about going out to the ballpark even after over 30 years of broadcasting. He says it's invigorating never to know what's going to happen. And he describes himself as a perennial optimist, one who's still waiting for a Twins first.

HERB CARNEAL: The only thing, I guess that hasn't happened to me in all the years I've been broadcasting, is to be with a team that won a World championship. In 1965, we were in the World Series. It looked like we might win it, but we got beat by the Dodgers.

So that's one thing that would round out my career, so to speak, is to have been associated with a team that was a world champion.

BILL CATLIN: And with the Twins record of late, there may be joy in Mudville yet. This is Bill Catlin reporting.