Fire Tony? White Sox's Mr. 'He Gone' Says La Russa Shouldn't Be Axed

CHICAGO — Tony La Russa has been fired only once in his baseball career and the man who canned the Chicago White Sox field boss insists all these years later had nothing to do with the way the future Hall of Famer did his job.

Ken “Hawk” Harrelson was the Sox general manager who chased La Russa from the South Side in 1986. Nearly four decades later, Harrelson maintains he knows baseball’s second all-time winningest manager better than almost anyone else with the lone exception being perhaps La Russa’s wife.

And it's that long-standing relationship that gives Harrelson reason to call B.S. on all of the disgruntled Sox fans that are calling for the manager's head — again.

Sure, the passionate former TV voice of the Sox gets why Sox fans are peeved to the point to start voicing their opinions during games at Guaranteed Rate Field in recent weeks. But Harrelson — the Hall of Fame baseball lifer who coined the phrase “He Gone” — doesn't count himself among the company of Sox loyalists who want to “Fire Tony” — the two words that have become a popular war cry on the South Side.

Harrelson, who once famously Fired Tony three years after La Russa led the Sox to the American League West championship, is now a staunch supporter of the 77-year-old manager that nearly 67 percent of nearly 1,700 respondents to a Patch Poll believe should lose his job.

Harrelson gets it. A team deemed a strong contender for a division title that is now scuffling in the middle of the not-exactly tough American League Central Division is a far cry from where fans expected the talent-laden Sox to be. But even as fed up with underperforming as Sox fans (Harrelson included) may be, cutting La Russa loose for a second time isn't the right call, Harrelson insists.

“When you’ve got the best manager in the game, which (owner Jerry Reinsdorf) does and you’ve got the second-winningest manager in the history of baseball, you give him the benefit of the doubt,” Harrelson told Patch in a recent telephone interview. “It’s just that simple.

“Does he make mistakes? Damn right he does, and every manager does.”

Chief among the baseball sins fans accuse of La Russa is recently intentionally walking the Dodgers’ Trea Turner with a 1-2 count and with two outs with the Sox trailing in a game that proved to be the tipping point for Sox fans.

La Russa elected to intentionally walk Turner to get to Max Muncy, who promptly delivered a 3-run home run that put the game out of reach. In response, baseball lost its ever-loving mind over the move, which La Russa defended based on the two hitters’ respective averages when down two strikes.

Sox play-by-play announcer Jason Benetti questioned the call on the air and armchair managers jumped all over La Russa and his two-day defense of the decision, which made headlines not only in Chicago but across the national baseball landscape that prompted a response from Reinsdorf through a team spokesman that said he doesn't plan to address his manager's job status anytime soon.

But La Russa's decision-making and refusal to allow anyone to challenge his authority, has drawn the ire of Sox fans who want La Russa gone once and for all. Harrelson, for one, writes the angst off as a passionate fan base that simply wants to see their team win.

“Do I like it? No, I don’t like it,” Harrelson said of the chants. “But (fans) have a right and our Sox fans are going to voice (their opinion) and Tony understands it. He gets pissed off too when the club’s not playing well.”

He's certainly not alone. But while the Sox have fallen short of the championship dreams everyone piled on La Russa when he was hired by Reinsdorf despite not managing since 2011, Harrelson said he has never seen a team that has been as snake-bitten by injury as the Sox. Since La Russa took over prior to the start of last season, his team has endured one injury plague after another — including to star shortstop Tim Anderson — and he says that La Russa can only manage the players he has to manage.

Unprompted, Harrelson said that while he is the only executive to ever fire La Russa, he didn’t do it because La Russa was a bad manager. He did it, Harrelson told Patch last week because he didn’t give La Russa enough to work with to be competitive nearly 40 years ago.

And now, Harrelson believes that in a baseball culture he calls "agent-driven", La Russa deserves some rope regardless of what the fans say.

La Russa's players tend to agree. Sox first baseman Jose Abreu told reporters on Sunday that he ignores the chants calling for La Russa's job. If fans are going to be angry, Abreu said, it should be with the team on the field rather than with the Hall of Famer in the dugout.

“It’s easy to blame the manager when things aren’t going right, but at the end of the day, it’s on us,” Abreu told reporters, adding that La Russa is all he could ask for as a person and a leader. “We are the ones who are performing on the field. The responsibility has to be on us.

“It’s easy to say whatever you want to say, or the critics will say whatever about the manager. But they are not here. They are not in the clubhouse. They don’t know how united or how good we are. ... In order for them to blame Tony, that’s easy. But they don’t know how good we are in the clubhouse.”

When the Sox are healthy and when they play up to their potential, Harrelson believes the Sox are as good as anyone in the American League. But right now, they're far from it —and based on the passion of a fanbase Harrelson considers among the best in the American League, he says that voicing their displeasure over an under-performing team simply goes with the territory.

Especially in a town like Chicago where the volume on displeasure tends to get cranked up when things aren't going as they should. And no one, Harrelson says, understands that better than La Russa.

“If you’re going to manage a high-level team like that with the fans who are very vociferous," Harrelson said, "you expect it when you’re not playing well.”

So while the chants for La Russa to get the “He Gone” treatment from his bosses and namely the only voice in the organization — Reinsdorf — that can truly "Fire Tony" the only man to ever send La Russa packing is riding with La Russa as long as he wants the job no matter what the wins and loss record may suggest.

“When you get guys like (La Russa), you let them manage,” Harrelson told Patch last week. “They’re going to do some things that knock you off your feet so to speak. But overall, I wouldn’t trade Tony for any manager in baseball.”

The majority of Sox fans aren't so sure. And as long as the Sox keep scuffling, nothing's going to change their mind. No matter who it is.