With any luck, the last time I walked into prison will be the last time I walk into prison. I had an absolute blast. Then again, I stayed just three hours and didn’t eat any of the food.

The purpose of the visit: to interview baseball’s last 30-game winner, Denny McLain, on Sept. 21, 2001, for a chapter in my second book.

“How can you write a book about Ernie Harwell?” McLain barked from the door of the visitors’ room of the McKean County Correctional Institute, a minimum-security joint in northwest Pennsylvania. “He’s never done anything bad in his life. What can you say about Saint Ernie? … It’s nice to know somebody who nobody says anything bad about.”

McLain, 31-game winner for the 1968 Detroit Tigers, was right. I didn’t find anybody who said anything bad about Ernie Harwell, just 278 pages of love. This past week’s kind words spoken about the beloved voice of the Tigers and Hall of Fame broadcaster were spoken in earnest.

Born in Washington, Ga., Ernie died Tuesday at the age of 92 in suburban Detroit, a happy day for anyone familiar with the gentleman’s rich spirituality.

Harwell’s southern cadence so perfectly matched baseball, a sport that moves along slowly, keeping pace with a hot summer day. Sure, he had his trademarks in the booth, such as assigning a hometown to the man or woman who caught every foul ball.

“There’s a souvenir for a young boy from Novi,” he would say.

Not everyone knew he made up the towns on the spot, and he was asked, “How do you know where all those people are from?” That triggered the most endearing smile in baseball.

Harwell viewed silence as his greatest ally in the booth. He liked the idea of a listener picturing a 12-year-old boy crushing a Dixie cup with the heel of his sneaker.

Famed Dodgers executive Branch Rickey heard Harwell calling Atlanta Crackers games, loved the sound, knew the owner of the Crackers and called him to inform him he needed an announcer. The Crackers needed a catcher. So Rickey dealt Cliff Dapper for Harwell, the only player-for-announcer trade in history.

In Brooklyn, Harwell called the games of Jackie Robinson, then moved across the city to work New York Giants games where he called the major-league debut of Willie Mays and Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” on the first coast-to-coast TV broadcast of a major sporting event. As voice of the Baltimore Orioles, he called Brooks Robinson’s debut. Next stop, Detroit.

Before hitting the big leagues, Harwell had a radio show on WSB in Atlanta, on which he interviewed in studio the likes of manager Connie Mack, slugger Ted Williams, heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey and golf great Bobby Jones. Unannounced, he drove to the home of cantankerous Ty Cobb for an interview and formed a friendship. As a little boy, “Gone With the Wind” author Margaret Mitchell was on his Atlanta Georgian paper route.

Ernie had kind words to say about all of them and treated everyone he met as if they were important. You suppose that might have something to do with why I didn’t find anyone who had anything bad to say about him?