Kenneth Smith Harrelson, nicknamed “The Hawk,” was born September 4, 1941 in Woodruff, South Carolina.
The big and powerful Harrelson was baseball’s 1960s flower child. He wore his blond hair long and sported Nehru jackets, beads, bell bottoms, and no socks. He was an excellent baseball player who hit three home runs in the first Little League game ever played in Savannah, but was by nature a competitor who also played football, basketball and golf. Ironically, he regarded baseball as his worst sport.
Welcome to the Baseball History Podcast: Featuring This Week in Baseball History, baseball dictionary and a tour of baseball cities. I’m your game announcer Bob Wright.
This is game 12 of the 2010 baseball season
In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 3 week of March.
March 19
1970 Indian Ken Harrelson fractures his leg and will miss most of the season.
Kenneth Smith Harrelson, nicknamed “The Hawk,” was born September 4, 1941 in Woodruff, South Carolina.
The big and powerful Harrelson was baseball’s 1960s flower child. He wore his blond hair long and sported Nehru jackets, beads, bell bottoms, and no socks. He was an excellent baseball player who hit three home runs in the first Little League game ever played in Savannah, but was by nature a competitor who also played football, basketball and golf. Ironically, he regarded baseball as his worst sport.
Harrelson was the youngest child of a single mother who was his biggest supporter and who worked hard to support her son. Fortunately, Harrelson proved at a very young age that he was an extraordinary athlete
Despite being an excellent baseball player and a Basketball Schoolboy All-American, Harrelson was fondest of football and he accepted a scholarship to play at the University of Georgia. His mother asked him to reconsider, feeling that baseball would pay better, so her son decided instead to play baseball professionally.
The two teams offering serious money were Kansas City and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Los Angeles promised a larger bonus, but Harrelson signed with the A’s because he was convinced that he would be in the majors faster if he chose the Athletics.
At a Gulf Coast Instructional League game in Florida in 1959, one of Harrelson’s teammates, Dick Howser, came up with a new name for him. Harrelson’s nose, which had been broken several times and had started to take on a distinctly beak-like aspect, was a point of great amusement for Harrelson’s teammates. Howser, who thought that Harrelson looked like a character in a popular comic strip, took to calling him “Henrietta Hawk” in a mocking manner.
Aggravating the matter was the fact that Harrelson, one of Kansas City’s most touted prospects, “wasn’t doing squat as far as hitting goes,” and the usually thick-skinned Harrelson began to take offense to Howser’s name calling, dubbing him “Slick” in retaliation. One day, after another especially disappointing effort at the plate for Harrelson, Howser again poked fun at the frustrated rookie, causing the latter to lose his cool, saying, “Hey Slick, why don’t you lay off?”
Howser responded, “I’ll lay off when you get a hit.”
Disgruntled but inspired, Harrelson took the field the next day and hit two homers. “Okay,” said Howser, “I’ll drop the Henrietta.” The name “Hawk” stuck.
After two more or less average years in the minor leagues in 1959 and 1960, Harrelson started to show promise in 1961, when he hit 25 home runs, with 114 Runs Batted In, and had a .301 average.
The next year, Harrelson exploded and set Eastern League records with 38 homers and 138 Runs Batted In. In 1963, Harrelson continued to improve, and his solid play with Portland of the Pacific Coast League, did not go unnoticed, as the Athletics promoted Harrelson to the majors.
In ’64, Harrelson played only 49 games with the Athletics, who finished in tenth place. In 1965, the Hawk would play 150 games and slug 23 homers–though the Athletics would still finish in tenth again anyway.
Harrelson learned some lessons about relating to fans during his early years in Kansas City. One day, after a tough day at the plate, Harrelson, who was in a hurry to get to a party, rebuffed a bunch of kids requesting his autograph. While he was shoving his way through the overeager youngsters, he felt a firm hand on the back of his neck, pulling him back towards the clubhouse. Harrelson, by now incensed and ready to fight, turned towards the person who the hand belonged to, but felt his anger melt away when he found himself face to face with his mother’s favorite player and his own childhood hero, baseball legend Rocky Colavito. Colavito pulled Harrelson aside, and let him have it, telling the rookie on no uncertain turns that he should always take the time to sign autographs for the people who paid his salary. Harrelson never forgot the lesson, and from that point on would treat the fans with respect and courtesy.
Though Harrelson would soon make a name for himself on the baseball field, what really would put him on the radar in professional baseball was his prowess on the golf course. In 1964, just a year after his major league debut, Harrelson played in his first golf tournament for major leaguers and earned a second place.
Golfing, besides being Harrelson’s passion, would become part of his legacy – the popularization of the batting glove. One day in 1963 after two long rounds of golfing with Athletics teammates, Harrelson developed painful blisters on his hands.
Arriving at the ballpark for that night’s game, he found it would be easier to grip a bat if he wore the gloves he had used earlier that day to golf. When Harrelson stepped to the plate in the first inning against the New York Yankees, his teammates scoffed, but after Harrelson had a great night at the plate, both the Athletics and the Yankees showed up at the ballpark the next day wearing golf gloves. And thus, the batting glove was born.
In 1966, after 63 games, a series of heated public arguments and angry private exchanges with A’s Owner Charles O. Finley, Harrelson was traded to the Washington Senators, where he played for the remainder of the season and some of the next before he was reluctantly reunited with Finley, who bought him back in the early months of 1967.
Harrelson had never seen eye to eye with the eccentric owner, but he liked Kansas City, and thus patiently put up with Finley’s shenanigans. Harrelson had always been co-operative with Finley, even when he was asked to take part in one of the baseball mogul’s more infamous pranks–a donkey named Charlie O. that Finley repeatedly forced Harrelson to ride.
Finley’s antics were usually rash and impulsive, often causing more harm than good, and Harrelson bore them with tolerance. Harrelson now says, “Charlie had some good ideas and some bad ideas but overall he was not a nice man.”
After Finley suspended pitcher Lew Krausse on August 18, 1967, for what many viewed as a trumped-up offense, Krausse’s teammates, led by Jack Aker, Harrelson and a half dozen other players, read a statement criticizing Finley. Manager Alvin Dark revolted, refusing to bench Krausse, instead choosing to voice his support for the pitcher.
Finley, not known for level-headed decisions, fired Dark, prompting Harrelson to publicly denounce the owner. On the morning of August 24, the Kansas City papers wrote that Harrelson had called Finley a “menace to baseball.” Finley seethed, and all the extra effort harrelson had employed to try to appease his boss was wasted when he was put on irrevocable waivers on August 25–because of his refusal to attend a press conference to apologize for a statement he says he never made.
Because Harrelson was having an excellent year (he had been hitting .273 at the time of his release), he found himself the subject of one of the first free agent bidding wars in modern baseball history.
Among the bidders in the battle for Harrelson were the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox were in the middle of a pennant race and had started the season with Tony Conigliaro as their right fielder. When Conigliaro, a popular and talented local sports hero, was tragically felled by a fastball on August 18, ending his season and curtailing a very promising career , the Sox began searching for a replacement.
General Manager Dick O’Connell saw the release of Harrelson as an opportunity to fill the gap left by the injury to Conigliaro. After an intense struggle with several major league teams, O’Connell and the Red Sox finally signed Herrelson for $150,000 on August 28–approximately a $138,000 increase in salary.
In many ways, the signing of Hawk Harrelson marked the end of the age where the owner was boss, and the beginning of the era in which players controlled their own destinies. Harrelson was someone the Red Sox desperately needed, and while O’Connell knew it, so did Herrelson; the end result, an incredibly lucrative contract by the standards of the time period.
The Red Sox and Harrelson were a perfect fit, and it was in Boston that The Hawk took wing: the Red Sox needed a power-hitting right fielder, and Harrelson, who was having a great season, filled the bill perfectly. And not only did Boston love The Hawk, but Harrelson reciprocated that love.
In 1967, the fans were behind Ken Harrelson all the way, and the now-happy outfielder helped the Red Sox take the pennant. Besides being a solid outfielder, he was also a great clubhouse influence who could take the strain of a pennant race off other players like Carl Yastrzemski.
Harrelson had not played his best with the Red Sox, hitting just .200 with only 14 Runs Batted In. On top of that, Harrelson did not have a good World Series, and the Red Sox lost in seven games. Evem though he had knocked out some clutch hits, including a key Run Batted In in their pennant-clinching game, it was a definite possibility that his poor play would result in a trade.
However, shortly after Opening Day, it became clear that the Hawk would roost in right field at Fenway for at least one more season.
The Red Sox did not win a pennant in 1968, but Harrelson helped keep them competitive. He valued runs batted in above all other measures of individual success, and leading the league in Runs Batted In in 1968 with 109 is something he remains proud of nearly 40 years later.
Again and again, The Hawk picked up the Sox, seemingly always getting a big hit when one was most needed. He hit 35 home runs during the season, 13 of them game-winners. Harrelson was enjoying Boston immensely and playing better than he ever had before.
In the early stages of the 1969 season, in a shocking transaction, the Red Sox dealt Harrelson to the Cleveland Indians along with Juan Pizarro and Dick Ellsworth in exchange for Sonny Siebert, Joe Azcue, and Vicente Romo.
The move came as a paralyzing blow to Harrelson, who loved Boston, and could not imagine leaving it. Harrelson’s Red Sox teammates were distraught, and the Hawk himself was inconsolable. Angry fans picketed the front office protesting the trade. Despite Harrelson’s public displays of disappointment, when Harrelson announced that he would retire rather than play for another team.
How could The Hawk nest anywhere else but Boston? He was loved by the fans, loved by his teammates, loved by sponsors, endorsers, businessmen, and consumers. Harrelson simply could not leave Boston–he would rather not play.
For Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, the situation was a nightmare. Azcue and Siebert had already said they would not go back to Cleveland, and the other three players involved in the transaction were caught in limbo–freshly dressed in their new uniforms but not eligible to play.
Meanwhile, Harrelson waited, in the middle of the frenzy. On April 21, Harrelson and his agent met with the commissioner and resolved the situation. Harrelson loved baseball “too much to hurt it,” and he reported to Cleveland the next day.
In 1970, playing in a spring training game against his former team, the Oakland Athletics, Hawk slid into second base and immediately felt a shooting pain in his leg. It was broken.
After the 1971 season, having played only 69 games since his injury, The Hawk felt an emotion that was entirely new to him. Harrelson today says, “I just lost my desire to play baseball. I was still a competitor, The Hawk was still there, but I didn’t want to play baseball anymore.”
Harrelson sadly announced that he would quit the game he had loved for so long to pursue a professional golfing career. That pursuit ended badly, and Harrelson turned back to baseball once more in 1975, coming back to Boston–this time as an announcer.
In 1981, Harrelson was hired as play-by-play announcer for the Chicago White Sox, where he served until 1986, when he moved from the broadcast booth to the front office, serving as the White Sox executive vice president of baseball operations for a year.
In 1987, Harrelson returned to the broadcast booth for good, taking a position doing play-by-play for the New York Yankees. He returned to the White Sox in 1991, and works there today in the same capacity.
His Southern twang and enthusiastic catchphrases have made him a fan favorite–and also have led to some fans calling for his dismissal, claiming that his accent is unintelligible and his baseball phrases hackneyed.
The Southern charm of Ken Harrelson is usually what millions of White Sox fans hear every night when they tune in to the White Sox games on TV. He claims that he loves the game “more than ever.”
A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Alexander Edelman. It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org
In this inning we’ll open up the Baseball Dictionary
Under the letter: A
Arm speed
The velocity with which a pitcher throws the ball.
If you would like to a part of Baseball History Podcast, submit your written contribution for the tour segment. I will only be doing the tour when one is sent in by a listener. You can do the segment on any stadium or team; past or present; Minor League, Major League, Negro League or any league outside of the US. Write about 1 page in a conversational tone, send it to me, I will record it, and you will get the credit.
You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.
You can follow me on Twitter; I’m BaseballHistory.
Look for the new BHP web site at Baseball History Podcast at baseballhistorypodcast.com.
Well, that’s it for today’s game of Baseball History Podcast. I’ll see you later at the ballpark.
