He's been our uncle, our pal, our fellow Reds fan, hoisting a cold Hudy and hollering like the dickens to force a hard-hit ball up and out of the ol' ball orchard. But in his new book, Joe: Rounding Third and Heading for Home, author Greg Hoard, the Channel 19 sports director and former Enquirer baseball writer, gives us glimpses of the Ol' Lefthander we have never seen before.

We all know the story of the 15-year-old athlete from Hamilton signed to a Reds contract in 1944, when the best players were in a different kind of uniform, fighting a World War II, and Major League Baseball was limping along with players either long in the tooth or too young to shave.

We all know of his only appearance that season, on June 10, 1944, before 3,500 fans at Crosley Field, where he was pummeled by Stan Musial and the St. Louis Cardinals. "I guess I finally realized where I was and what I was doing," Nuxhall says in the book.

But in Joe, Hoard takes us to deeper places. He paints a portrait of a loving, Depression-era family. They see Joe's athletic talent as a ticket to a better life. That's especially true for his father, Orville, a factory worker whose own skill as a Hamilton Sunday League pitcher might have taken him to the big leagues had he not had a wife and five children to support.

And we see Joe, after his less than auspicious major league debut, being sent to the Birmingham Barons, the Reds farm club in Alabama, far from the close-knit family he loves so much.

Hoard takes us into the head of a lonely teen suddenly thrust among men in a strange place, trying to find himself as a pitcher. The loneliness drives Joe to make up a story about his mother being sick and asking permission to return home.

It took seven more seasons before Nuxhall made it to the majors, where he was a mainstay of the Reds pitching staff through the 1950s and much of the 1960s.

While the book is replete with stories from Joe's boyhood and minor league days, it races through his major-league career with little detail. We suspect we know why - Nuxhall is old school; what happens in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse.

The last two chapters deal with Nuxhall's 38 seasons in the Reds radio broadcast booth, the place where he landed after his fastball left him.

There, he was teamed up in 1974 with Marty Brennaman, the play-by-play man who shared the booth with Nuxhall for 31 seasons. They became, as Reds equipment manager Rick Stowe says in the book, "like an old married couple," inseparable friends who would finish each other's sentences.

Despite Nuxhall's occasional on-the-air flubs and mangling of names, Brennaman realized long ago, as Hoard has in his book, that the love in this city for Nuxhall is powerful.

"In all the years we have been together, I have never heard one person, not one, say anything negative about him," Brennaman writes in the book's foreword. "Think about that, and then ask yourself if there is anyone in public life you can say that about."

And, the more we know, the more we love him.