Piecework

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 ^was brought 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.

Hernandez, by all accounts, loves his children; he dotes on them when he is with them, even took a few days out of spring training to take them to Disney World. Marriages end; responsibility does not. Hernandez says that he would like to marry again someday and raise a family, but not until he’s finished with baseball. One sign of maturity is the realization that you can’t have everything.