Keith Hernandez

The Greatest Baseball Person of All Time

I love baseball.  I love the New York Mets.  I love Keith Hernandez.  I also love my wife and children.  Some others.

Keith Hernandez would no doubt be among the guests invited to my ideal dinner party.  This dining experience would also include Abraham Lincoln and Norm MacDonald.  Only one is alive.  Keith, let me know if you have any dietary restrictions.  I genuinely hope the others will be able to make it as well. 

Why the fascination with Keith Hernandez, you ask?  Why wouldn’t someone be fascinated by Keith Hernandez?

For one thing, his first name is Keith and his last name is Hernandez. Already interesting.  His nickname is Mex, which is a moniker that should either be ironic or offensive because he’s not of Mexican heritage, but somehow it’s perfect. 

Keith Hernandez was the best player on the best team in baseball history, the 1986 Mets.  One day I will write a suitable tribute to that beloved team, who won the World Series in the greatest season and postseason in baseball history, which I experienced in real time when I was 12 years old.  To be honest, as magical as it was, I sometimes feel a certain melancholy when I think about it, if only because it reminds me that most everything else in life and sport is defined by disappointment.  Especially with the Mets. 

Yes, there were other great players on that team, but Keith Hernandez was just as good as any of them. They won 108 regular season games, which is top 10 all time, but they surely would have won a few more had they not spent every night of the season partying in the New York City of the 1980s.  And if you don’t think that Keith Hernandez was smack dab in the middle of that shit, you don’t know Keith Hernandez. 

He wasn’t only their best player.  He was essentially their manager as well.  Imagine having the world’s foremost expert on baseball standing next to you on the field the whole game.  That was Keith Hernandez.  

If you watched any documentary or read any book about the 1986 Mets, you would know that Keith Hernandez was responsible for one of the most consequential mound visits in baseball history.  During the last inning of the 16-inning marathon against the Houston Astros in Game 6 the National League Championship Series (by all accounts an elimination game for the Mets), he famously told the clearly exhausted Mets pitcher, Jesse Orosco, “If you throw another fastball, we’re going to fight.”  With two outs and two on, up by one, Orosco then struck out Kevin Bass to end the series—on three straight sliders.  Keith Hernandez was also clutch that postseason, driving in the key runs in the Mets ninth inning comeback in the Houston game (after calling his brother in the 8th inning for hitting advice), and driving in the key runs during the Mets comeback in Game 7 of the World Series (everyone forgets the Mets were losing 3-0 in the bottom of the 6th inning in that game).    

Keith Hernandez also understood that baseball is ruled by certain gods, impetuous deities capable of delivering great and terrible outcomes depending entirely on whether you, the devout player or fan, demonstrate sufficient deference to such beings.  This is why after Hernandez made the second out in the tenth inning of Game 6 down two runs, and went into the manager’s office to drink a beer so that he wouldn’t have to watch the Red Sox celebrate on his team’s field, and after his teammates strung together a few hits, Hernandez resolved to watch the rest of the game on television and didn’t move an inch.  “There were hits in that chair.”     

What made Keith Hernandez the world’s foremost expert on how to play baseball? The origin story is that his father was a bit of a psycho who regularly gave written baseball tests to him and his brother, Gary, who also played professional baseball (and whose first name also doesn’t quite match up with the last name).  Watch any Mets broadcast over the past 18 years.  During any given broadcast, Keith Hernandez the analyst will point out every time a player meets the Hernandez Family standard and every time they fall short.  This astute but brutal eye was certainly passed down from his father, much like Leopold made Wolfgang keep practicing that violin.  This might have caused at best a complicated father-son relationship, family strife at worst, but the world now has Mozart’s 40th Symphony and the Marriage of Figaro.  Hernandez Senior might have been quite the taskmaster, but it produced 11 straight Gold Gloves, one MVP (shared, again interesting), one World Series championship with the Cardinals, one-life-defining-generation-defining World Series championship with the Mets, and one brilliant post-playing career.     

Keith Hernandez was not an imposing physical specimen.  He was barely six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds in his prime.  He was drafted in the 42nd round.  He was not particularly fast or strong.  He has 162 lifetime home runs and 98 lifetime stolen bases (caught 63 times).  Keith Hernandez might have done as much with what the Good Lord gave him physically as any athlete that ever lived.  His greatness was derived almost exclusively from his mind, curated and refined by years of constantly studying the game.  As a 12 year old, I knew intuitively that the player I should seek to emulate was the one that I could plausibly see myself growing up to be like as an adult, even though I also knew intuitively that I would never have the glorious facial hair of my baseball idol. 

Keith Hernandez is known for his moustache, much like his contemporary Tom Selleck.  But Tom Selleck has been hit or miss with his moustache since Magnum P.I. ended, deciding at various points that he would abandon his identity and succumb to the style of the times.  Why would you abandon something so beautiful that women would throw themselves off tropical cliffs for even the slightest chance of beholding it?  (Today, when the stache is back, he’s usually just using it to sell reverse mortgages to grandmas, which I’m pretty sure means that when you die Tom Selleck gets your house.)   To my knowledge, Keith Hernandez never shaved his moustache.  He was so confident about who he was that he just sat back and let it become more and more awesome over time.  What I love about Keith’s moustache is that it is basically an extension of his underrated magnificent head of hair.  At some moment in the mythical past, a mighty oak let loose a lone acorn, which landed above the lip and sprouted another mighty oak.  Life finds a way.   

Everything he did, Keith Hernandez did great.  Even commercials.  Keith Hernandez was once in a commercial for Just For Men hair coloring gel. "No play for Mr. Gray."   Classic. Speaking of post-baseball heroics, do I even need to mention Seinfeld?  If you’re keeping score, the best player on the best team in baseball history, in the best city in the world, played himself on the best episode (two-parter) of the best sitcom in television history—Season 2, before anyone even watched it. 

Jerry (on Keith Hernandez): Yeah, he’s a real smart guy, too.  He’s a Civil War buff.

George:  I’d love to be a Civil War buff.  What do you have to do to be a buff?

Jerry: So Biff wants to be a buff?  Well, sleeping less than 18 hours a day would be a start.       

After Seinfeld, he has also been a member of the best broadcasting booth in baseball.  For the past 18 years, Keith Hernandez has been the analyst for Met games on TV, alongside Ron Darling—his even more handsome teammate with the 1986 Mets—and play-by-play savant Gary Cohen.  These guys are unrivaled in the game, and it’s not even close.  Yes, I’m biased, but I’m also right.  How do I know I’m right?  As douchey and deluded as Yankee fans generally are, I’ve never met one who believes they have better TV announcers.  They will look you in the eye and tell you that Don Mattingly should definitely be in the Hall of Fame and that Tino Martinez was a great player (nope and nope), but they will never even pretend that anyone who has ever called a Yankee game is better than the Mets TV booth. 

For a guy who has a charming self-aware vanity to him, Keith Hernandez blends in seamlessly with the genius of the Mets TV booth.  Gary and Ronnie are consummate professionals, but Keith brings the Keith, and is just professional enough.  Keith Hernandez has been straddling the line between being a mainstream baseball announcer and a wildcard from the first day he called a game.  Note to the network brass: this is key to why they work so well together.  When he inevitably crosses the line in the future, don’t even think about going by the book.  He’s Keith Hernandez.   

Baseball is unique in being a game of individual torment, a Sisyphean quest to fail the least. When you watch a game with Keith Hernandez, he tells you everything the players on the field did right and everything they did wrong.  For Keith, and presumably his brother and father, there is a standard of perfection in baseball that exists.  Plato believed it in—it was right there on the cave wall.  The Hernandez family believed in it.  It is a standard that is impossible to achieve, but Keith Hernandez only asks that you (as a player and as a fan) acknowledge it and strive towards it.  

Each of my four children grew up playing baseball.  I have been their fan and their coach at various times, and I have—and still do—work with them on their skills.  We still hold family practices when we can, where I hit the ball and run infield practice, then do outfield, then do BP, then collapse because I’m almost 50 years old and what was I thinking?  But man, it’s one of my favorite things to do. What makes me qualified to coach anyone at baseball?  I haven’t played a lick of organized baseball since the third grade, but I have been listening to Keith Hernandez for the past 18 years, and watched him for ten before that.  Interestingly enough, I also read a book he wrote in the early 90’s in which he analyzed two random regular season baseball games—at-bat by at-bat—over the course of 300 pages.  He called it “Pure Baseball – Pitch by Pitch for the Advanced Fan.”   Such a classic Keith Hernandez title, he writes about baseball the way other people write about the opera.

Keith Hernandez is going to turn 70 years old this October.  I do not take any day that he shows up for his job for granted—Vin Scully called games for the Dodgers (by himself, crazily enough) until he was 88—but I know that everything eventually ends.  As much as the happy memory of 1986 brings an ambiguous corresponding feeling of loss, this particular realization makes me sad.  My own inevitable demise affects me less than the thought that one day Gary, Keith, and Ronnie will no longer be doing the Mets broadcasts together.  I have caught my ten-year old son watching Mets highlights on YouTube, highlights in which they show the footage of Keith, Ronnie and Gary in the booth alongside the game broadcast.  He loves to watch them watch the Mets.  I had always yelled at my kids whenever they would watch YouTube videos of other people playing video games, but somehow watching videos of the SNY booth calling a game is just fine with me.  How else is a kid going to learn what it means to be great at something?

I hate wearing any article of clothing that has a visible brand logo.  I don’t feel comfortable wearing so much as a Nike logo (I’m not calling it a swoosh, fuck you) when I’m exercising alone in my basement.  But I do own one shirt with Keith Hernandez’s name and picture emblazoned across the front, and it’s my favorite shirt.  I don’t wear it ironically.  I don’t wear it as a conversation starter (why would I want to have a conversation?).  I wear it because he’s Keith Hernandez.  And I wear it especially because my kids bought it for me for Father’s Day one year, a proud sign that they get it.     

I just hope the Mets are able to give them a hint of the same glory I bore witness to when I was 12.  I know in my heart of hearts that there will someday be future magic, but I also know all too well that that magic is purchased with pain.   

Since this tribute has apparently turned into a full length biography, it is worth noting that in 1985 Keith Hernandez was called upon to testify in a federal criminal case against a defendant who was dealing drugs to baseball players on the Cardinals.  This testimony under oath revealed that Keith Hernandez, like many professional ballplayers during that period, was quite fond of using the party drug of the era: cocaine.   Hernandez says to this day that this revelation hurt his reputation.  Not in this household.  Not because we love cocaine, never tried it, but because even though Keith Hernandez may be a larger than life human, he is human nonetheless.  He was a smoker at times, a drinker at times, and at worst the cocaine episode will no doubt lead to some entertaining stories when Keith and I are drinking scotch after dinner waiting for Abe and Norm to show up.       

Last year, the Mets finally retired Number 17.  In a pregame ceremony before a random July regular season game, Keith Hernandez was given a chance to speak about the honor.  He delivered his speech to a packed stadium.  How often do you see a stadium packed for a pregame ceremony?  It’s sometimes really nice to realize that you are not alone.    

In closing, is it appropriate to call Keith Hernandez the Greatest Baseball Person of All Time?  You’re right, that might be off base.  Do we really need the word “Baseball” there?