The error was caused by HBase's Thrift server not being proper configured. I installed/configured Thrift and added the following to my hive-xml.site with the proper server information added:
<property>
<name>hive.metastore.uris</name>
<value>thrift://<!--URL of Your Server-->:9083</value>
<description>IP address (or fully-qualified domain name) and port of the metastore host</description>
</property>
I thought the snippet above was not required since I am running Cloudera HDP in pseudo-distributed mode.Turns out, it and HBase Thrift are required to use HCatalog with Pig.