Joshua Lott for The New York Times
White Sox announcer Ken Harrelson is critical of the emphasis on sabermetrics. He called its rise "the biggest joke I've ever seen."
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.
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