Buckley: Why Dennis Eckersley is stepping down as Red Sox broadcaster at the top of his game

From nana and papa to nonnie and pawpaw, all grandparents have preferred handles by which they are to be addressed by their kids’ kids.

For Hall of Fame pitcher and NESN color analyst extraordinaire Dennis Eckersley, the preferred handle is … Grampa. It’s a handle without sizzle, without bite and without entertainment value, unless he plans to audition for an upcoming Hallmark special. And the unglamorousness of it all is the entire point: What better way to explain Eckersley’s decision to retire from analyzing Red Sox games on NESN than to simply point out that Grampa wants to spend more time with his two grandkids?

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To the public, he has a nickname — Eck — that is short and sweet and instantly conjures images of sizzling, sidearm fastballs and a demonstrative ripcord-pulling arm motion after a strikeout has been registered. And to hear that name, to read that name — Eck! — is to be reminded, too, that he’s a man who has all but reinvented the way we speak baseball. Eck taught us that a good fastball is “cheese” and that a really, really good fastball has “hair” on it. But the actual hair on a person’s head? If it’s good hair, it’s “moss.” That one’s been around for a while, but Eck took ownership.

Eck put “walk-off” on the map, too. Heck, it’s a stat now: So and so has eight walk-off hits this season …

Yes, it’s cool, way cool, when Eck is in the booth. He and the late Jerry Remy teamed up with play-by-play announcer Dave O’Brien and gave the Red Sox a threesome that managed to walk that razor-thin line between breaking down the game while providing entertainment that sometimes broke us up. Eck’s arrival in the booth made for a wonderful renaissance for Remy, who was battling health issues but clearly enjoyed having his old Red Sox teammate in the booth. As for O’Brien, he didn’t get enough credit for knowing when to gently pull his chair away from the mic when Eck and Remy were cooking up a good story.

What a wonderful gesture, then, that it was Eck who caught the ceremonial first pitch that Remy threw prior to last October’s wild-card game between the Red Sox and Yankees at Fenway Park.

Remy made the toss, and Eck went out toward the mound and handed him the ball. “See, Jerry? Everybody loves you,” Eckersley told Remy. “I love you, everybody loves you.”

Jerry Remy died 25 days later.

As NESN looked ahead to 2022, the plan was to celebrate Remy’s life, his playing career, his broadcasting career. But NESN also had to recruit a new color analyst, the hope being that a fresh chemistry experiment would result in a new threesome Sox fans could appreciate. Former Red Sox infielder Kevin Youkilis has worked out particularly well, and a couple of pairings of Eck and former Boston Herald sportswriter-turned-talk show host Tony Massarotti have been offbeat and entertaining.

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With Eckersley’s retirement, we won’t know where those arrangements could have taken NESN.

But it’s not so much that Eck is going away, but that Grampa Eckersley is going home. The plan is for him to be in the booth on October 5 for the final game of this fast-fading Red Sox season, after which he and his wife, Jennifer, will complete a long-in-the-works move to the Bay Area.

Eckersley said he’s been thinking about retirement “for probably a year, a good year. But I think when you get to 65 you start to think about these things.”

He’s now 67. He turns 68 on October 3, two days before the Sox close out the regular season with a late-afternoon Wednesday matinee at Fenway Park against the Tampa Bay Rays.

And then he’s trading himself to the twins.

“There’s a boy and a girl,” he said. “And I like being with my grandkids. 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.”

According to Eckersley, NESN tried to move the chess pieces around in order to keep Eck in the booth.

“They did, they did, and I hemmed and hawed about that,” he said. “I was thinking, OK, I can hang in there, maybe they can do a smaller thing, I’ll do five games here, five games there, whatever.

“I finally said to myself, ‘You know what? That’s kind of cheating,’” he said. “I don’t know how to do that. I have to be all-in. And if I’m not all-in, next thing you know I’ll be grinding because I’m not on top of my game.”

What happened, though, was this: “I thought about it, and then I thought otherwise,” he said.

In case you’re wondering — and I guess this next part will be of particular interest to Bay Area baseball fans — Eckersley doesn’t have plans to resurface as a color analyst for the Oakland A’s, for whom he emerged as a dominant and colorful closer in the late 1980s, blazing a trail that would lead to Cooperstown, N.Y., home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“Doubt it,” he said of taking a booth gig with the A’s. “I just want to regroup at some point here.’

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And he won’t be entertaining the thought of crossing the bay and joining the San Francisco Giants’ broadcast team, even if there’s some historical precedent for such a move. The late Tom Seaver, the iconic Hall of Fame pitcher who’ll forever be known for his days with the New York Mets, actually did New York Yankees games on television from 1989 to 1993.

“It would never be the Giants,” he said, and he didn’t mean a bit of disrespect.

“It’s just that, if anything, I would do something with the A’s, maybe something like shake hands,” he said.

Eckersley grew up in the Bay Area. His wife is from Cleveland. They currently live on the South Shore. But to highlight the point that this move has been in the planning stage for a while, they already have a place lined up in the Bay Area.

Aside from his NESN work, Eckersley’s most recent public appearance was at the Hall of Fame induction last month in Cooperstown. He rode in the annual Parade of Legends on Saturday, and on Sunday sat on the stage for the induction ceremony, which included former Red Sox slugger David Ortiz.

“I tried to keep it quiet, even out there,” said Eckersley of his plans to retire. “I usually spend a lot of time with Jim Palmer, but he wasn’t there this year. I spent a lot of time with Rickey Henderson. We’re good friends. And he lives in the Bay Area.”

Before making his for-real return to the Bay Area, there will be a September trip to Oakland for Eckersley that’ll be all about friendship and the good old days, back when the A’s won three straight American League pennants and the 1989 World Series. The A’s plan to retire the uniform No. 34 of former ace pitcher Dave Stewart on September 11, and Eckersley wants to be on hand for the ceremony.

“Gotta be there for Stew,” Eckersley said. “That’ll be good.”

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In September, then, Eck will be going home.

To be followed by October, which is when Grampa Eckersley is going home to face the twins.

(Top photo of Eckersley: Stan Szeto / USA Today)