A quiet end to the Hawk Harrelson era

When I started writing a weekly White Sox column for The Athletic this season, Hawk Harrelson’s farewell season was the one specific request for my beat.

As you might imagine, it’s tough to write about somebody who frequently repeats himself without re-tilling the same soil.

Also, few of the features accompanying Hawk’s last year — his second “as told to” autobiography, his second “as told to” documentary, the interviews, the guest spots — helped paint a more complete picture of a person in the present day. Sure, we learned some new details about his upbringing, and we’re now well aware that he detests social activism, but there still wasn’t much of a three-dimensional picture.

When he spent the majority of his Hawk Day speech recapping how the White Sox did during his time in the booth, I started doubting he had much else. His pregame comment about watching “‘Walker, Texas Ranger’ and turning a lot of Smirnoff into urine” might have been funny if he hadn’t told Yaz the same thing back in May. Without a more fulfilling answer four months later, it was all kinda unhealthy.

That lack of balance was more or less the subject of today’s column for The Athletic. Hawk’s final broadcast hinged on Steve Stone’s rather simple question with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, and it never recovered.

Harrelson couldn’t summon his mojo afterward, because the on-field product was going down quietly, too.

As I mentioned in the podcast, it would’ve been nice to have a close friend like A.J. Pierzynski or Tom Paciorek in the booth to put an arm around Hawk and coach him back to words. Stone and Harrelson aren’t that close in any sense of the word. I suppose that’s another thing we learned about from Hawk’s newer book: He borderline boasted that he’d never dined with Stone in all their years of working together. Maybe they have their reasons, but without a more personally invested party in the booth, Harrelson’s last broadcast closed with 2½ innings of one coworker giving another coworker space.

It wasn’t the most satisfactory of finales, but it probably wasn’t going to get better. In fact, we’re lucky that his departure from the booth and Jason Benetti’s introduction were this graceful. If Harrelson were wired slightly differently — and maybe if he lived in Chicago — he could’ve called White Sox games into his eighties, because his style could’ve accommodated aging. He never described the rote actions you could see for yourself, so any change in reaction time wouldn’t have changed his rhythm, and he still could bring it for the big calls that delighted White Sox fans and annoyed the piss out of everybody else. Alas, a lack of curiosity, a genuine connection with Stone and exciting White Sox baseball all combined to whittle down his range.

Harrelson proclaimed for years that he wanted to die in the booth, so I’m glad he sensed a shift, and that the Sox were both proactive and delicate in transitioning from an institution. I give everybody involved a passing grade, because it was only going to be so good as long as the White Sox are so bad.

My hope is that the Hawk/Ken split-personality we’ve heard about for years is actually true. That Hawk Harrelson was a TV character merely getting phased out of a TV show. And, that Ken Harrelson is a fully formed individual who has pursuits and passions outside of the limelight when he doesn’t need the persona.

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