Dennis Eckersley didn’t mince words when he announced he’d be retiring as NESN’s lead analyst on Red Sox telecasts at the end of the season.
“I like being with my grandkids,” he said, referring to a pair of twins, a boy and a girl. “Does that make me feel old? Yeah, possibly. But that’s a good thing, you know? I embrace it. I really embrace it. It doesn’t make me depressed.”
And so Eckersley, who turned 68 on Monday, is trading himself from the Red Sox to the twins. His final broadcast will be Boston’s season-ending game against the Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday afternoon at Fenway Park. What then? Since these twins play their home games in the Bay Area, that’s where Eckersley and his wife, Jennifer, will be relocating.
The move also means Eckersley will be returning to the scenes of his greatest triumphs, beginning with his days as a baseball/basketball star at Washington High School in Fremont, Calif., about 25 miles south of Oakland in the East Bay. And it was in Oakland, with the A’s, that the one-time 20-game winner as a starter later reinvented himself as a ninth-inning closer of such dashing, mustachioed acclaim that he was one of the most instantly recognizable athletes in professional sports.
It was mainly because of his nine seasons with the A’s, from 1987 through 1995, that Eckersley was elected in 2004 to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.
On Aug. 13, 2005, two weeks after his formal Cooperstown induction, Eckersley’s No. 43 was retired by the A’s. He was driven onto the field at what was then called McAfee Coliseum in a yellow convertible as a sellout gathering of 47,385 cheered and shouted his famous nickname.
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