I'm Keith Hernandez

I love baseball.

But I find most books about baseball players boring. There seems to be a standard template for how you write them. Maybe it’s because there are so many of these books out there, but it feels like they’ve become a paint-by-numbers exercise, dictating what you talk about and how you talk about it.

Forget that. I’m Keith Hernandez. I want to write this my way.

When I was a kid, my father would come home from his twenty-four-hour fireman shift and bring fresh San Francisco sourdough bread from the local bakery. If we were lucky, he also would have stopped by the Spanish market and picked up chorizo sausage. The bread would still be warm from the baker’s oven, and Mom would spread some butter or jelly over it and give it to my brother and me. Soft on the inside with a crust that made your teeth work just the right amount. It was wonderful. I want to make this book something like that. Something that you set your teeth into and say, “Keith, that’s pretty good. More, please.”

So I’ll need to keep things easy and moving along. I want you to feel the spontaneity I feel when I reflect.

And I have specific periods I want to focus on. (In the broadcast booth, I find that when you try to talk about everything, you wind up saying nothing. People just tune you out, and even if they don’t, they can’t possibly learn very much.) I want to talk about my development as a baseball player and how it got me to the major leagues; I want to talk about how I gained the confidence to thrive in the bigs despite a grueling haul; and, finally, I want to talk about how my development as a young player affects how I see the game today from my seat in the broadcast booth.

Because I’ve spent most of my life around baseball, I have good stories to tell. And I love sharing them with others.

Like the other night: I was sitting at a table at Harvest on Fort Pond in Montauk, New York, with my good friends Paul and Chantal Weinhold. The place was packed with folks enjoying the cozy environment and excellent food, and I had brought a couple of bottles from my wine cellar for the table. We were happy, and the talk was easy and fun. It’s always that way with Paul and Chantal, a married couple I’ve known since my playing days with the Mets.1

Somewhere along the way, we started talking about baseball—specifically, this year’s Mets team. Paul, who’s a psychologist and finds the mental aspects of the game fascinating, asked about a Mets starting pitcher, a flamethrower who was successful at getting batters out but had a tough time holding them on base during the rare occasions they got on. The opposing team had made five swipes against him a few nights earlier.

“He’s been doing it one way for years,” Paul said, referring to the pitcher’s delivery to home plate. “And now people expect him to change. Can he?”

“Why not?” I said. “Doc [Gooden] did it at the start of his major league career. He had the same issue.”

“But how difficult is that sort of adjustment?” Chantal asked. “After all, like the rest of us, aren’t baseball players creatures of habit?”

I said it would take time, and, yes, some players get stuck when opponents expose a weakness.

“It’s more about mental toughness than the actual adjustment,” I said, and I told them how Nolan Ryan would storm around in between pitches, strutting like John Wayne ready for a gunfight in the town square. “You got the feeling that, if he had to, Nolan could throw the ball with his other hand and still find a way to get batters out. For this guy on the Mets, he’s got to tap into that sort of mentality: This is my mound, and I will do anything to protect it. After that, it just becomes a matter of decreasing his delivery time to home plate while not giving up any of his outstanding stuff. It’s that simple.”

Then I recalled a story I had been told years earlier. To me, it defines that territorial attitude a pitcher must have to be successful.

“Did I ever tell you what Don Sutton told me? About what he did when Tommy Lasorda tried to mess with his pregame routine?” I asked while topping off the glasses with a 2007 Insignia. Paul and Chantal shook their heads, and I could see they wanted me to go on. I mean, it’s Tommy Lasorda and Don Sutton, two Hall of Famers, so it was not a hard sell.

Even though they’re not ballplayers, Paul and Chantal understood the psychological significance of this story. Sutton was saying, Okay, Lasorda, this is my day to pitch and my mound. I’m in control! Don’t you dare screw with that again. And a pitcher who’s got that sort of cojones—giving a batter a free pass to second base just to make a point to his manager—will also have the guts and the grit to figure out how to keep winning ball games. He will make adjustments.2

“Now,” I said to Chantal and Paul, “all quality major leaguers—pitchers and hitters—have that sort of moxie. Sutton had it in spades, of course, but everyone’s got to have at least a little bit. Because a baseball career is really just a series of adjustments. Those who adjust get to continue, while those who don’t need to find another line of work. So if this kid from the Mets is going to be around awhile, and I think he will be, he’ll make the necessary adjustments and get over this speed bump, because it’s his mound and nobody’s going to take it away from him. He’ll do what needs to be done, period. And the longer he can do that, the longer he’ll be in the league.”

Then I couldn’t help myself—here we were talking baseball, and it brought me to another place. Another time. So I told my captive audience that I had one more story for them:

“And what was the result?” I asked the table.

“A no-hitter,” said Paul.

“That’s right!” I said. “The only no-hitter of Tom’s career. Imagine that! There had to have been a bit of satisfaction knowing that he’d achieved it without anything close to his usual dominant power stuff.”3

“Had you ever seen an adjustment that stark by a player?” asked Chantal.

“Never,” I said. “Before or since. One night he was Dr. Jekyll, the next, Mr. Hyde. It was amazing. But, again, Tom just understood what had to be done and made it happen.”

From there, the conversation at the table moved away from baseball, but the theme of performance and mindset hung around, a steady driver for the rest of the evening’s talk. And that’s the beauty of a good baseball story. It not only slides well into conversation but also feeds conversation. That’s why it’s the national pastime: it fits in with our own stories, ballplayers or not. Baseball is additive rather than disruptive or merely benign.

So how do I start my baseball story? How about this:

I guess that could work, but I’d really just be selling us both short. Because when you’re fortunate enough to be around the game and in the public eye as much as I’ve been, you develop standard responses whenever people want to know something about you. Even if you’re good at “being yourself,” you still have your go-to’s. And that sort of a beginning would send me on a path of a lot of go-to’s.

Throw it on the boring pile…

I want to go deeper. I want to strip everything else away to reveal something about myself you can’t “discover” in a Google search. I want to get to the core of my baseball story.

I should note that my original intention was to slog through my life, dragging you, the reader, along with me in this slow, chronological procession. Like a death march (and standard operating procedure for a sports memoir). Interestingly, I think my brief time on the Seinfeld set those many years ago has helped inspire me to do otherwise. Because it was there, seeing Jerry and company at work, that I first caught a glimpse of storytelling’s creative process. Going into the week of shooting “The Boyfriend” episodes, I had thought that we would simply stick with the script. But once I was on set, I saw that the script—the original idea—was really just a starting place. There were three writers in addition to the show’s creators—Larry David and Jerry—and then, of course, the incredibly talented principal actors. All of them had input into each scene. It was very experimental—Let’s try this; how about this?—and I was fascinated by just how much the original scene could change once the ensemble’s creative juices were flowing. And when you think about it, that inventiveness and spontaneity is actually a lot like playing in a baseball game, where you’re forced to improvise almost constantly. Well, then, that’s the way I wanted to go about this endeavor: loose and ready for anything.

Then it hit me one day in the grocery store:

That’s where I want to start the book! So I thought for a while until I hit on another plane ride:

And those became my goalposts: Every time I tried to move beyond ’79, I came back to that span of years—particularly to ’74, ’75, and ’76. Those were the hardest yet most instructive years.

Talk to any player who was able to achieve a sustained career in the major leagues and ask him what the most important years in his career were. He’ll say, “The hard ones.” Because it’s in those struggles, when you’re fighting to survive, that you’re actually learning how to thrive in baseball. (Though you may not realize it at the time, it’s happening.) But first, the game will have its pound of flesh. And for some of us, like me, it was more like two pounds. You have to keep fighting. You have to bare your teeth and growl and claw and scratch until one day, still hanging on, you realize, Hey, I’m a bona fide big leaguer and a damned good one!

So that’s what I want this book to be. A story about a promising talent who became a professional ballplayer with a lot of expectations but not necessarily with the moxie to “own it”—to get in the box against guys like Tom Seaver, Don Sutton, and Nolan Ryan and say, “Okay, I’m gonna go toe-to-toe with you, and I’m gonna win.”

That sort of confidence came, but it took a while, and that journey—the making of a player like Keith Hernandez—feels like something worth sharing.

Something to chew on.

I realize that if you’re an ’86 Mets fan or you’re looking for the story behind Whitey Herzog’s ’82 world-champ Cardinals, this book is a prequel to the movie. The in-depth stories about those teams are terrific but have also been exhaustively celebrated in magazines, films, and, of course, books (I’ve written a couple of them). My hope is that after reading this, you will better appreciate my role in and contribution to both of those storied teams and franchises.

I don’t want to gloss over my “hard” years. They’re too important to me—to my love of baseball. Because after withstanding them, I could withstand anything.

Okay. Let’s begin our journey.