Thursday marks the beginning for the end for the White Sox legendary broadcaster. Or as A.J. Pierzynski dubbed it: "The Year of the Hawk."
Hawk Harrelson was at Guaranteed Rate Field for the White Sox home opener, the first game of his final season in the booth. The 2018 will serve as quite the sendoff for the longtime voice of the South Siders, with his face already plastered on the media guide, a Star Wars themed bobblehead giveaway set for later this season and much more in terms of goodbye festivities.
But perhaps the most anticipated part of the Hawk sendoff will be the promised team-up in the booth with Pierzynski.
The former White Sox catcher has his own broadcasting career underway, working with FOX, but on the South Side in his capacity as one of the White Sox new ambassadors Thursday, he once again talked about how excited he is to call a game with Harrelson this summer.
“I’ll move heaven and earth to do a game with him,” Pierzynski said. “It’s always kind of been a dream of mine to do a game with him. I’ve said this for a long time, he’s the best. How he’s not in the Hall of Fame still, I don’t understand. He deserves it, for all the things that he’s brought to baseball, not only playing, but as a commentator and a play-by-play guy. I mean, if you just watch any TV show or anything on media, you see people using the things that he came up with, like ‘he gone,’ ‘put it on the board,’ people say it all the time just in everyday language. So just for that alone he should be in the Hall of Fame.
“And then to be able to sit down next to him and do three hours, I can listen to his stories, I can tee him up and Hawk can knock ‘em down. It’ll be like bowling. I’ll set all the pins up, he comes in, bowls 300.”
To which Harrelson shouted out: “Pin boy!”
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Harrelson and Pierzynski are longtime associates, their friendship stretching way back, long before Pierzynski played for the White Sox. In just the last six months, each has voiced support for the Hall-of-Fame candidacies of the other, another recurring theme Thursday.
Pierzynski, whose playing career ended after the 2016 season, has taken plenty of inspiration from Harrelson. Unsurprisingly, most of what’s impressed Pierzynski about Harrelson is the latter’s emotional attachment to the team and the game.
“His passion,” Pierzynski said. “It’s a little different. He gets to see a team for a whole season, and I walk into a place for one day and try to do the whole season in one game. But the passion that he brought every day was what I admired more than anything because he would generally care. People would be like, ‘He’s full of crap.’ He genuinely cared about the White Sox every game.
“That’s the thing you try to portray. If you really do care about the game, you care about what’s happening and you care about when guys do it right. That was a big thing for me always was doing it right, playing it right. Always on the broadcast, you can feel that when you watch.
“Him not being there, even now. I turn on games and I know he’s not going to do it, but I turn it on, Jason’s doing great, Stone is great, but for some reason when I turn on a White Sox game it hurts my heart a little bit not to hear his voice. It still gets to me every time because it’s so different.”
While Harrelson has always been a polarizing, love-him-or-hate-him figure in Chicago and even within the White Sox fan base, there’s no doubt that South Side baseball without Harrelson will be a strange sound, considering it hasn’t happened in decades.
What will be the most different, though, will be the removal of Harrelson’s proud homerism from the broadcast booth. It might be missed by some fans. It won’t be missed at all by others. It likely won’t be missed by big league umpires who have so often been the target of some of Harrelson’s more fiery complaints.
“Everybody I ever (worked) for gave me the leeway and the flexibility to be myself and say what I wanted to say,” Harrelson said. “Now, (White Sox chairman Jerry) Reinsdorf on numerous occasions has gotten on my behind about umpires. ‘Hey, lay off the umpires.’
“But to me, umpiring is an integral part of the game, obviously. Just like a player. We’ve got good players, we’ve got mediocre players, we’ve got bad players. You’ve got good umpires, you’ve got mediocre umpires, you’ve got bad umpires. And the only thing that really got me about umpires was if they didn’t hustle, if they didn’t bust their butt. But I’ve been lucky in being able to have flexibility.”