For any reduced crystallographic root system, we introduce a unitary representation of the (extended) affine Hecke algebra given by discrete difference-reflection operators acting in a Hilbert space of complex functions on the weight lattice. It is shown that the action of the center under this representation is diagonal on the basis of Macdonald spherical functions. As an application, we compute an explicit Pieri formula for these spherical functions. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.