Pete Hamill - Piecework

New Yorkers don’t easily accept ballplayers. They almost always come from somewhere else, itinerants and mercenaries, and most of them are rejected. We look at Darryl Strawberry and unfairly compare him to Snider, DiMaggio, Mays, Mantle. We question his desire, his heart, his willingness under pressure to risk everything in one joyful and explosive moment. Since he is young, we reserve judgment, but after four seasons, he still seems a stranger in the town. Those who are accepted seem to have been part of New York forever. Hernandez is one of them.

He was born on October 20, 1953, in San Francisco. Although his teammates call him Mex, he isn’t Mexican at all. His grandparents on his father’s side immigrated from Spain in 1907; his mother’s side is Scotch-Irish. Keith’s father, John, was a fine high school player (hitting .650 in his senior year) and was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers for a $1000 bonus in 1940. According to William Nack in Sports Illustrated, John Hernandez was badly beaned in a minor league night game just before the war; his eyesight was ruined, and though he played with Musial and others in some Navy games, when the war was over, John Hernandez knew he couldn’t play again. He became a San Francisco fireman, moved to suburban Pacifica, and started the process of turning his sons, Gary and Keith, into the ballplayers he could never be. They swung at a balled-up sock attached to a rope in the barn; both playing first base, they learned to field ground balls, thousands of ground balls, millions.

From the time Keith was eight, he and his brother were given baseball quizzes, questions about tactics and strategy, the fundamentals. His mother, Jackie, took home movies at Little League games, and they would be carefully studied, analyzed for flaws. John Hernandez was not the first American father to do such things; he will not be the last. But he did the job well. Perhaps too well.

“My father taught me how to hit,” Keith says. “He made us swing straight at the ball, not to undercut it, golf it. A straight swing, an even stroke. He really knew.”

But Nack, and other writers, have described the relationship of father and son as a mixed blessing. In brief, John Hernandez is said to be unable to leave his son alone; Keith is one of the finest players in the game, an acknowledged leader of a splendid world championship team, the father of three daughters of his own; but too often, his father still treats him as if he were the kid behind the barn, learning to hit the slider. When Keith goes into a slump (and he has one almost every year, usually in midseason), his father is on the phone with advice. As Nack wrote, “Keith knows that no one can help him out of a slump as quickly as his father can, and so, throughout his career, he has often turned to his father for help. At the same time, he has felt the compelling need to break away from his father and make it on his own, to be his own man.”

Obviously it would be a mistake to think that Keith Hernandez is the mere creation of his father. His brother, Gary, was trained the same way, went to Berkeley on an athletic scholarship, but didn’t make it to the majors. Keith had his own drive, his own vision. At Capuchino High (where he hit .500 one season), he also starred on the football and basketball teams, and says that football was particularly good training. “I was a quarterback, and I had to make choices all the time, to move guys around, read the other teams’ defenses. But I was 5-11, 175 pounds then and that was too small, even for college. I went down to Stanford for a tryout, saw the size of these guys, and decided baseball was for me.”

Major league scouts were watching him in high school, but in his senior year he quit the team after an argument with the manager. Most of the scouts vanished. Until then, it had been expected that Keith would be a first-round draft pick in the June 1971 free agent draft; instead, he was chosen by the Cardinals in the 40th round. He had always been a fairly good student, and was accepted at Berkeley, but when the Cardinals offered a $30,000 bonus, he decided to head for professional ball.

There are hundreds of stories about minor league phenoms who burn up the leagues and fizzle in the majors; Hernandez had the opposite experience. He has always hit better for average in the majors than he did starting out in A ball at St. Petersburg in 1972 (.256) or AAA ball at Tulsa in the same year (.241). He found his groove in Tulsa in ’73 and ’74? and wasbrought up for 14 games in St. Louis in 1974. He hit .294 in those games, was soon being described as the next Musial, started the 1975 season at first, couldn’t get going, was sent down again, and brought up again the following year, this time to stay.

That first full year with the Cardinals, he hit .289, the next year .291. Still, he didn’t feel secure. In 1978, the year he met and married Sue Broecker, he slumped to .255. “I didn’t feel I was really here until *79,” he says. That year, he hit .344, with a career-high 210 hits. He won the batting championship, and shared the Most Valuable Player award with Willie Stargell, who hit .281.

“Yeah, you get better,” he said one afternoon in St. Petersburg. “You know more. You watch, you see, you learn. You know something about pacing yourself too. One of the most important things about the minors is learning how to play every day. In high school, college ball, you play maybe twice a week. You don’t know what it’s like to do it day in and day out… In the majors, you’re seeing guys over and over. You look at a guy like Steve Carlton for 11 or 12 years. You know how hard he throws, you know how his breaking ball is, you know how he likes to pitch you. And you know the catchers too, how they see you, what kind of game they like to call.”

Hernandez is one of those players who seem totally involved in the game. On deck, his concentration is ferocious. After an at-bat, including those in which he fails (“a great hitter, a guy who hits .300, fails seven out of 10 times”), he is passing on information about pitchers.

“I look for patterns,” he says. “I usually only look at the way a pitcher pitches to left-handed hitters. I don’t pay much attention to the right-handed hitters. What does he like to do when he’s in trouble? Does he go to the breaking ball, or the fastball, does he like to come in or stay away? I look for what you can do to hurt him. There are very few pitchers that are patternless. Of course, there are a few guys — Seaver, Don Sutton — who don’t have a pattern. They pitch you different every time. That’s why they have 500 wins between them, why they’re future Hall of Famers.”

Hernandez is known as a generous player; he will talk about hitting with anyone on the team “except pitchers, ’cause they might get traded.” Pitchers themselves are a notoriously strange breed (a player once described his team as being made up of blacks, whites, and pitchers), and though Hernandez is friendly with all of them, and was amazingly valuable to the young Mets staff in the 1984 season (Gary Carter didn’t arrive until ’85), he still maintains a certain distance.

“Most pitchers … can’t relate to hitting because they can’t hit, they’ve never hit. They don’t know how. And there’s very few that know how to pitch. But it’s not so simple. Some guys you can hit off, some you can’t. I was always successful against Carlton, and he was a great pitcher. And then there’s some sub-.500 pitcher, and you can’t get a hit off him. It’s one of the inexplicable mysteries of baseball.”

Hernandez clearly loves talking about the craft of baseball. But there are some subjects he won’t discuss. One is his ruined marriage to Sue Broecker. There have been various blurry published reports about this messy soap opera. How Keith played around a lot after the marriage, particularly on the road. How they broke up after the All-Star game in 1980, then reconciled and had a baby. How Keith liked his booze after games, and later started dabbling with cocaine. She got fed up, one version goes, and then demanded most of his $1.7 million a year salary as reparations. In my experience, the truth about anybody else’s marriage is unknowable; thousands struggle to understand their own.