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.

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(A.J. responded in kind with a newspaper ad that he may well have had already written up years ago)

But Craig Calcaterra said he’d never “seen a team wax so effusive of a departing player as the White Sox just waxed about A.J. Pierzynski”, and Tim Baffoe of The Score made sure let people know he thought the Sox treatment of the situation was “weird”. Apparently, from outside the White Sox bubble, this outpouring came off as a bit much.

First and foremost, it more or less mirrors the response that Mark Buehrle’s departure received last year. There might not have been an immediate official statement, but there was an outpouring, and it was loving and tender.

“He’s not a Hall of Fame pitcher by any means, but he’s a real pro. He took the ball every single time and battled, was great in the clubhouse, caught first pitches, made appearances, was a great guy. He was perfect for our team.”

-Jerry Reinsdorf to ESPN on 12/9/11

“I just told the Marlins’ ownership, ‘You got one hell of a pitcher, but let me tell you, you got a better person,’” said Williams of his brief talk with Loria. “You have a humble person. You have a person that no matter how much money or success he’s had over the years, he is still the first person out to catch the first pitch from a fan.

“From there, I expounded as to his virtues, and not only his but his wife’s. They are good people. You don’t completely replace good people. He will always be a part of the White Sox family.”

-Kenny Williams

That’s pretty touchy-feely, but also for a better player that was longer-tenured. It’s not a true equivalency, but reflective of the fact that the Reinsdorf has been much more open about displaying his personal affection toward players and other members of the organization since the World Series title. Kenny Williams too.

The World Series title that also brought about the incident where the best player in franchise history left in a huff because he felt that not enough fanfare was given to end of his tenure. That ended in the GM calling said greatest player in franchise history an “idiot”, before airing out his exhaustion at the star treatment that the player had received, and even implying that he had money problems. Frank Thomas eventually returned to the franchise as a smile-laden ambassador, but it would take a little while.

Thomas was the last long-tenured player that didn’t come up under a Williams/Hahn regime that the franchise had to deal with the departure with, but with that memory still in place, it seems perfectly prudent to get out ahead of any feelings of abandonment departing veterans might have. Even if it’s a littler over the top.

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@soxnerd JulioFranco remains 1 of my all time favorite #WhiteSox players for completely irrational reasons. He was a beast in a Sox uniform.

— LuzinskisBeard (@LuzinskisBeard) December 16, 2012

First of all, the man’s right. Franco hit .319/.406/.510 in 505 plate appearances for the Sox in 1994, played in 112 of the team’s 113 games despite being a 35 year-old coming off of knee surgery, and shored up a DH slot that had been the achilles’ heel of the division-winning 1993 club. Hard to imagine, I know, the White Sox punting away the DH position for a full season, but they did, and Julio Franco was a remarkably brilliant signing.

The hubbub around him on Twitter is concerning his Hall of Fame candidacy, which, has pretty much no chance. Franco’s offensive numbers are impressive for a middle infielder, but Franco was not particularly impressive as a middle infielder, and is not really remembered for sticking around there, especially since his time as a capable reserve backup 1st basemen stretched out around seven years longer than anyone could have anticipated.

His single season with the White Sox might be the most luminous entry on Franco’s resume, but the aftermath might have been the final nail in any notions of his candidacy.

After hitting 25 home runs and knocking in 112 to cover up a .294 on-base percentage in 1992, George Bell was an easy, universal type of bad in ’93, but there was still a unmistakable whiff of forward thinking in the White Sox selection of Franco as his replacement. Sure, there was plenty of discussion of Franco being an RBI-man, and providing “lineup protection” for Frank Thomas, but his sheer knack for getting on-base, compared to Bell’s hacktastic ways, were noted both by the Chicago Tribune’s Alan Solomon…

“Together, the nine Sox who played DH hit 22 homers and drove in 103 runs in 654 at-bats, which are competitive numbers. But together, they scored just 69 runs, worst in the league (Franco alone scored 85 in 529 at-bats); and they drew 33 walks, easily worst in the league (Franco walked 61 times.)”

…and White Sox manager Gene Lamont:

“There probably are going to be people who say a DH should have a little more power,” Lamont said. “It’s always nice to have home runs, but it doesn’t really matter how you score ‘em as long as you score ‘em, and he has been a real good big-league hitter for quite a while.”

Franco wound up having plenty of power as it turned out. He hit 20 home runs in just those scant 112 games, but that was already enough to be his career-high. Also a career-high in a strike-shortened season were Franco’s 98 RBI. I generally dismiss RBI as a meaningful measure of performance, but it serves as a reminder that Franco was hitting behind Frank Thomas every day. It was the last time the Sox could flaunt two .300/.400/.500 guys in the same batting order.

Despite Franco’s incredible season, he spent the next year out of major league baseball. Unwilling to wait out the strike that pushed on till April of 1995, Franco agreed to play in Japan for the year. His departure was his own independent decision likely brought on by Franco’s desire for job certainty, but it’s unlikely that he would have found a welcoming home on the South side even if a resolution had been reached months earlier.

Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf was identified by many as a primary figure in prolonging the MLB strike and taking a hardline stance against larger shares of the revenue being doled out to players. From that, one could make a tangential argument that Reinsdorf drove Franco away–Frank Thomas certainly held it against him at the time. But while Reinsdrof is seen as a hypocrite for later handing out a mega-contract to Albert Belle, there’s no questioning his commitment to combating the inevitable upward trend in player salaries in the immediate aftermath of the new labor agreement.

“My original plan was to unload all the high-salaried guys except for Frank Thomas and trade for young players, rebuild the ball club. To get the payroll down [from $44.8 million] to $20-$22 million. If we drew a million fans, my accountant had it figured out we’d make a $5 million profit. It would have been the smart thing to do. Then I got nervous. What if I destroyed the franchise? I thought if I signed Albert Belle I’d excite the city.”

There’s a few years between those events, in which time the Sox sent away Jack McDowell for a package headlined by Lyle Mouton, were less successful in their attempts to acquire cheap, aging DH’s with Chris Sabo and John Kruk, and probably didn’t charm anyone by letting Joey Cora walk in free agency, even if Ray Durham was ready. The Sox made a point of spending less, and the team floundered. No further investigation of the cause and effect relationship was desired.

At the time, a Chicago press that is commonly complimentary to Reinsdorf these days, and defers to the descriptions given of him by his closest employees, was surprisingly merciless. The Tribune’s Robert Bonner decried the dishonesty of pinning the blame of the failure of the 1995 team on Gene Lamont rather than his boss, and the Daily Herald’s Scot Gregor prefaced a call for the Sox to be sold to someone who cared more about winning with the admission: “This is probably going to cost me my free-meal ticket at Comiskey Park.”

But I digress. It’s hard to focus on Julio Franco, or any element of the early-90′s White Sox without addressing their dismantling. It’s easily forgotten, since some of the most outspoken critics at the time–Thomas and Robin Ventura–couldn’t be on much better terms with ownership these days. Franco wasn’t around long enough for his departure to have much emotional resonance, and his envoy to Japan was more damaging to him personally than it was for the fan base.

Franco would wind up 414 hits short of the 3000 hit club, a plateau which would have lent arbitrary legitimacy to his case for the Hall. Nothing from his follow-up season to his career-year would count toward his major league totals, and while he was offered some full-time opportunities again, he would never eclipse the 505 plate appearances he garnered in strike-shortened 1994. He never had Herm Schneider as a trainer again, and was never healthy for the duration of a six-month season again. Just one of those coincidences, perhaps.

Or maybe not much was lost at all. The 1994 White Sox weren’t the sure shots for the World Series they’re often romanticized as–they were behind the Yankees for best record in the AL when play was stoped, and only one game up on Cleveland.  They were a playoff team, but could hold off on getting fitted for rings.. Julio Franco was coming off his age 35 season, and there’s a difference between taking a one-year flier and  paying for him coming off of his career-year. If Reinsdorf hadn’t made his intentions so clear, his departure could have been easily rationalized. Probably by someone like me.

But brief anomalies in history are more enjoyable when explored for all they might have been. Even if it takes 1200 words.

Follow James Fegan on Twitter @JRFegan