Which is not to say he did well. He did not. A friendly interpretation is that Harrelson simply had no interest or consideration for any point Kenny offered, and chose to ignore him. A less friendly interpretation…well, isn’t willful ignorance from someone who presupposes themselves as an insightful voice on the sport damning enough?

Hawk’s resistance and obstinance is well-established, to the point where halfway through an 11-minute segment of Harrelson blowing past actual points of contention to defend ideas that no stat-oriented baseball man questions–such as the notion that make-up matters or that overloading players with information should be avoided–it was baffling that Kenny would try to push along a concept as convoluted as  extrapolating Harrelson’s numbers across different eras and ballparks. It also was based in the notion that is Hawk’s ego stroked enough, he would relent in his objections. There’s plenty of room to condescend to Hawk’s opinions while leaving his integrity out of it.

So many anti-stat arguments get bogged down in diatribes about how numbers aren’t descriptive enough, then turn around and defend even more vague and antiquated numbers as eternally useful. Hawk simultaneously is and is not an exception to this rule, since he defended pitcher wins  but also complained that tangible metrics had failed to capture the impact of intangible qualities. Hawk will still quote batting average and home runs–which aren’t any closer to discovering the secrets to a man’s heart than UZR–yet employs a defense that rejects improvements to his information until perfection can be offered. The end effect is that he’s just not open to being convinced, and there’s not much fun in working up against that.

A more fun exercise is to see how any of the principles Hawk extolled work in application, since the White Sox are clearly applying them, if no farther than the #TWTW (The Will to Win) hashtag that Alex Rios picked up immediately (his emergence as a rah-rah type on Twitter and even in person to a degree is a prominent entry on the list of things people who haven’t watched baseball since 2011 wouldn’t understand).

#TWTW-Hawk Harrelson

— Alex Rios (@arios51) April 25, 2013

As far as rallying cries go, it’s a hell of a lot better than Rios quoting Bane’s lines from The Dark Knight Returns last year. When I heard that the White Sox had picked up the slogan immediately after Hawk’s appearance before having seen it, I was admittedly disgusted. It seemed to be the team embracing insularity as their public image, touting Hawk as if they only noticed he was a trending topic and didn’t bother to check the tone of discussion and desperately grasping at relevance despite the costs–the same motivations that can make the team a struggle to watch at times.

But Hawk’s delivery of the centerpiece of his argument–stats can’t measure TWTW, The Will to Win–is so blatantly prearranged and pre-planned that it doesn’t irritate anymore than any other piece of marketing ever has, and it beats the pants  off of the lip-synching video as the face they show the world.

The actual, for me at least, most depressing takeaway for me is that couching baseball as a test of mettle, heart and personal drive is an uncomfortable thing for a White Sox fan to do. Understanding that bad luck with seemingly safe big signings blowing up and mishaps in the talent pipeline both home and abroad have sapped away at the Sox strength the past few years at least offers solutions, even if they’re difficult and slow. If baseball is determined by the will to win, then the Sox have been regularly found wanting.

There weren’t just second-half slides the past four years, there were humiliating trouncings at the hands of chief rivals in crucial series and back-breaking failures by otherwise reliable players in crucial moments. Hawk touted Jake Peavy’s mental toughness as a key, but I would much rather appreciate his accomplishments through cold accounting of his 219 innings than think about any of his second-half starts against the Tigers last season.

It’s extremely odd that such an unabashed fan of the Sox would open the door for that type of thinking, but something tells me Hawk wasn’t mapping it out that far ahead.

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“Everyone loves a good train wreck. Or, possibly, and epic beatdown. Or if things go sideways, everyone will probably take some sick fascination in watching Brian Kenny go insane.  Any or all of which may happen tomorrow as Hawk Harrelson will appear on “MLB Now” with Kenny and Harold Reynolds at 4PM on MLB Network.”

Come to think of it, Hawk Harrelson appearing on national television in any capacity does not particularly jive with my daily hope that the White Sox–the team, the employees, their fan base, their surrounding region and larger essence–can skirt by without widespread scorn and embarrassment.

Harrelson’s vitality as a public figure these days is very much tied into how well entrenched he is as the voice of the White Sox, rather than his own merits. Thanks to MLB.TV and the degree to which in-depth digital media coverage has shrunk the baseball world, even Harrelson’ work as a hometown announcer can come under significant fire, but still enjoys support from his primary audience–fans for whom his presence is as natural and inseparable from the game as family and friends they watch them with.

Editor’s note: Not a picture of Hawk Harrelson. (Dennis Wierzbicki-USA TODAY Sports)

Uncommon among Hawk defenders are terms like “incisive analyst” or “valued voice on statistics” or even “diplomatic.” Because of that, his acceptance of an invitation to discuss his view of sabermetrics on MLB Network could easily read as him walking into his own demise in a manner that would make Sonny Corleone wince.

The problem is not even that his views on advanced statistics are contrarian, it’s that they’re underinformed and somewhat tossed-off. It’s fitting of his dismissive attitude toward the topic that would be so much more acceptable if he was dismissive enough to not discuss it at all, but all the more ill-suited for some sort of televised debate, where his opinion might actually be challenged once or twice.

What can hope to be accomplished from this? Did viewers really long for an idea of what Harold Reynolds would be like if he did less prep work?

Yet in all likelihood, this isn’t going to be the nuclear fallout it’s being billed as. First of all, rarely is anything the nuclear fallout it’s billed as–breakdowns in decorum are typically unplanned. Second, Hawk removed from the emotion of a live game is inevitably a less volatile entity and more reasonable. Finally and most salient is that Harrelson was calm when he acknowledged Kenny’s complaint on air and asserted that he still liked the man personally.

And as blusterous as Kenny might have come off in the isolated clip where he harangues Hawk, he’s too experienced and well-versed in the views of the old guard to actually keep the fire of this confrontation burning for much longer than the running time of the diatribe. If anything, this whole episode is out of character for Kenny, and the elements of this confrontation–save for the whole “virulently anti-advanced stats guy discussing advanced stats” part–aren’t particularly explosive. Especially since Harold Reynolds will be there, essentially echoing Harrelson’s worldview while in a nicer suit.

If and when two men who appear on television professionally managed to navigate through a seven-minute long segment without stabbing each other, the pointlessness of the encounter should set in. People discussing ideas they’re not interested in makes for some truly awful television.

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It was enough to make it not a surprise when Stone sounded not very thrilled to come back to the booth in September after a long season, and a bit of one when he changed his tune.

A lot of the formulas present in Chicago sports broadcasting are allowed to just persist, warts intact. But Chairman Reinsdorf apparently has no love for discord among his friends, and arranged a sit-down meeting between Hawk and Stone, along with VP of Marketing Brooks Boyer and senior director of business development and broadcasting Bob Grim. Hawk, speaking on WMVP-AM 1000, expressed satisfaction with how it progressed, declaring that every issue “got out on the table” and was fixed.

‘‘When we walked out of the meeting, I felt great, and Steve did, too. Everything is going to be fine between Steve and myself. We’ve always had a terrific relationship.

‘‘The last year and a half, it hasn’t been where it has been in the past. Now, it’s where it should be. There were some problems, and — you know me — if there’s something out there that I’m not easy with, I’m going to get it out. And we talked it over, and we’ll get back to where we were in 2009 and ’10.’’

Obviously, proactive maintenance of the broadcasting situation for someone who has had as many incidents as Harrelson has should probably be happening anyway, and kudos to Reinsdorf in this case, who at least seems determined to pair his steadfast loyalty to his longtime employees with acknowledgement of their issues.

However, one must hope that issues prompting the meeting and the resolution reached aren’t rooted in adjusting their fundamental natures as announcers, since they have both been around far too long to expect changes in that regard. Hawk is going to be emotional and sway with the fates of the game, and Stone is going to be dry, and favor more measured analysis. He even discusses rate stats other than batting average, when Hawk isn’t looking.

When Hawk missed the Sept. 27 game against the Rays, a loss that devastated the Sox playoff hopes and would have left Harrelson morose, Stone led an even-keeled broadcast with David Huff that may have lacked the regular play-by-play setup’s energy, but didn’t descend into misery alongside the Sox either. If it acted as a representation of how Stone conceives of the ideal broadcast, the differences are pretty stark.

‘‘The last year and a half, it hasn’t been where it has been in the past. Now, it’s where it should be. There were some problems, and — you know me — if there’s something out there that I’m not easy with, I’m going to get it out. And we talked it over, and we’ll get back to where we were in 2009 and ’10.’’

But Hawk’s enthusiasm is well-taken, even if the next time he isn’t the enthusiastic good soldier for the organization will be his first in decades. It’s worth noting that this arrangement wasn’t always a grumbling mass of contrasts, but a breath of relatively fresh and odorless air in the immediate aftermath of the Harrelson-Darrin Jackson booth. Perhaps this new attitude will even allow the White Sox TV broadcast team to reach such far off dreams like the radio team’s 29th place finish in FanGraphs’ national broadcaster rankings. Such dreams.

Follow James Fegan on Twitter @JRFegan