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Ken Harrelson is flattered, if a bit condescendingly, in Times profile. Between this and the recent MLBN special, I'd be predisposed to relish his authenticity if his announcing didn't suck so incredibly badly.
For Baseball Old-Timer, Numbers Aren’t the Story
By BEN STRAUSS
CHICAGO — Ken Harrelson was sitting in the television booth at U.S. Cellular Field last week before the Chicago White Sox hosted the Kansas City Royals when he broke into the story of how he would like to die. Harrelson, who goes by the nickname the Hawk, said he would be calling a White Sox game against the Yankees and Chicago first baseman Paul Konerko would step to the plate against C. C. Sabathia.
“Here’s the pitch,” Harrelson, 71, said, his voice rising. “That ball hit deep, way back. Curtis Granderson looks up, you can put it on the board — ”
Before he finished his signature call, Harrelson slumped in his chair and dropped his head, feigning his perfect ending.
“I want to die in the booth,” he said. “Just like that.”
Harrelson, in his 38th year of broadcasting and 28th with the White Sox, is many things, perhaps none more than a showman. His nickname is derived from his prominent nose, and it comes with a healthy dose of flamboyance dating to his days of long hair and Nehru jackets when he played for the Boston Red Sox in the 1960s.
Today, in his 50th year in baseball, his look is more befitting of a grandfather, but he is no less a character. His broadcasting style has been alternately called nauseating and nostalgic — and rarely anything in between.
From the booth, where he works with the color man Steve Stone, he tells stories in a syrupy southern style about old friends and teammates like Mickey Mantle and Carl Yastrzemski; a walking, talking testament to baseball’s golden age. In between, he shamelessly roots for the White Sox and routinely takes on umpires.
And these days, in an approach that could alternately be described as endearing or absurd, he has decided to take on the entire, and increasingly entrenched, world of statistical analysis. During a broadcast a couple of months ago, Harrelson went so far as to contend that those analytics — often referred to as sabermetrics — had cost too many good baseball people their jobs because they were unable to adjust to baseball’s new way of making judgments.
That, in turn, led the MLB Network host Brian Kenny to devote a segment of his own show to chastising Harrelson, seeing his attack on sabermetrics as a predictable, and ridiculous, outcry by an old-timer stuck in a bygone era. And then Harrelson joined Kenny on the MLB Network for a debate during which Harrelson declared that the only statistic he cared about was something called “T.W.T.W.”
That’s right, not O.P.S. (on-base and slugging percentages combined) or WHIP (walks and hits per inning) or WAR (wins above replacement, as in the number of wins a player creates versus an average replacement player, and a tough one for a lot of people, not just Harrelson, to get a handle on) or anything else from the new category of measurements. Just T.W.T.W., or in long hand, the will to win. A category that, of course, cannot be in any way shape or form be determined by looking at numbers.
Kenny said that when Harrlelson unveiled his T.W.T.W. yardstick he was “completely incredulous.”
Harrelson maintains that he does, in fact, like numbers and that sabermetrics does have a valued place in baseball, but that he would prefer it be a role much more limited that it is now and that too much deference is being paid in general to numbers crunching. He called its rise over the last decade “the biggest joke I’ve ever seen.”
“Look down there at a guy like Gordon Beckham,” he said, peering down at the White Sox’ second baseman. “If you got someone who gets a chance to take him out on a double play — like me — I’m not going to take him out, I’m going to take him out into left field.
“So if the shortstop bobbles the ball, and I have a chance to get him, he knows that. Gordon will get busted and he’ll take the hit. There’s no number to define that in a player.”
The role that advanced metrics has in an announcer’s booth is, of course, different from the one it has in the office of a general manager, who needs to be conversant with every measurement there is these days, even if he doesn’t believe in every one of them.
For instance, few if any broadcasters go into detail about a pitcher’s F.I.P. (an earned run average calculation independent of defense). But Harrelson stands out for his on-air disdain for the whole numerical movement. To him, “Moneyball,” the best-selling book (and movie) about how Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, used outside-the-box statistical analysis to hunt down player bargains is as much fiction as fact.
It should be noted that Joe Morgan, a far more prominent announcer than Harrelson when he did commentary for ESPN’s Sunday night baseball broadcasts, was also a critic of the sabermetrics movement and received flak for his stance.
Harrelson, in a local market rather than on a national stage, and with his image as a character firmly established, can probably coast along with his anti-statistics stance easier than Morgan could.
“I can get away with things most announcers can’t,” he acknowledged.
And that, said Bob Costas, a veteran sports voice who is most identified with his work in baseball, is not necessarily a bad thing.
“If I’m listening to the White Sox play the Indians, I’m listening for Hawk to tell a great story about Charlie Finley,” said Costas, who narrated an MLB Network documentary about Harrelson. “Or the time he was sitting with Mickey Mantle at an L.A. hotel and Marlon Brando walks in.
“If a guy doesn’t know what WAR is but he’s got good baseball war stories, I’ll take the trade-off.”
Still, said Jonah Keri, the author of “The Extra 2%,” a book about how the Tampa Bay Rays have utilized Wall Street strategies in remaining competitive with a restricted payroll, “you can love the aesthetic of the game, but if you say sabermetrics are useless and they ruin baseball, then you’re doing a disservice to your viewers.”
Not that Harrelson is about to change anything he does. The Wall Street Journal once named him the biggest homer of any baseball television broadcaster, but he was a finalist in 2007 for the Ford Frick Award, which is presented during the Hall of Fame weekend.
“He’s not Vin Scully or Ernie Harwell,” said Costas, citing two broadcast icons. “But everything he does, it’s 100 percent authentically him.”
Indeed, Harrelson’s distinct calls have long been Internet catnip. His catchphrases are so predictable his regular viewers often know what he will say before he says it: “He gone,” when an opposing player strikes out; “Rack ’em up,” for a double play; “Stretch!” for any deep fly ball hit by the White Sox.
With Chicago mired in last place in the American League Central, he has reached new heights this year. After a grand slam by Kyle Seager of the Seattle Mariners in June tied a game in extra innings, Harrelson’s call began, “That ball hit deep into right-center field,” followed by nearly 40 seconds of silence. That same week, he sounded physically ill when a potential winning home run by Adam Dunn was caught at the wall to end a game against the A’s.
“Dadgummit!” Harrelson cried, as the ball reached the warning track, but no farther.
To Harrelson, the reason is simple. “I wanted to win as a player and now I want to win as an announcer,” he said. Or to put it another way, T.W.T.W.
Harrelson, who hit 131 career home runs in nine major league seasons and later had a brief and inglorious stint as the general manager of the White Sox in the 1980s, wore a ring on each hand in the broadcast booth last week. One was a 1967 American League championship ring, courtesy of the Red Sox, the other a White Sox 2005 World Series ring, a triumph that ended an 88-year championship drought for the franchise, an accomplishment that Harrelson gleefully helped narrate.
Harrelson has long endured in a sport that has evolved around him, a feat that cannot really be measured by numbers but, in its own way, earns the respect of many involved in the game, including those who do swear by statistics. In fact, when searching for the best way to describe Harrelson, Kenny, his debating partner, settled on a quotation by Bill James, widely known as the father of sabermetrics.
“James once said that Earl Weaver had the gift to look at a player and see what he was and what he wasn’t,” Kenny said. “The way to look at Hawk is to enjoy him for what he is, and not worry about what he isn’t.” |
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