A Man in Full Unleashes His Inner Goof
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
This is what was visible from a few feet behind Keith Hernandez in the SNY TV booth during Thursday night’s Mets game:
He giggled. He banged his desk with a nearly-empty popcorn carton.
His face shifted from the monitor to his right, to the field below him, and to his left, to communicate, sometimes with just a wink, with Ron Darling and Gary Cohen.
He gesticulated with karate chops at infield gaps for hitters to shoot through.
He read his friends’ text messages to him (lots of OMG’s these days).
He moved his hands almost frantically to fill his scorecards. His arsenal of six Sharpie markers (toted in two schoolboy’s pencil cases) let him connect the color chosen for a reliever (say, orange for Pedro Feliciano) to the batters he faces. With the fleet of relievers being hauled in by Mets Manager Jerry Manuel, Hernandez often uses his green, yellow, pink, blue, purple and orange markers, then starts again with color No. 1.
“It’s my ‘Disraeli Gears’ scorecard,” he said, referring to the psychedelic cover of the Cream album.
Baseball is an emotional excursion for Hernandez. Just look at his face.
His eyes bugged out when Ryan Church eluded a tag to tie the score.
He and Darling cringed on cue at Daniel Murphy’s bunt attempt on a 2-1 count.
Hernandez’s expression turned to astonishment when Murphy struck out while trying again to bunt. “Look at Jerry!” he shouted into his mouthpiece at the production truck, hoping the exasperation of Manager Jerry Manuel would be captured on screen.
“Oh, my word,” Hernandez said, using a vaguely Victorian phrase that can evoke his disappointment, surprise and amazement all within a few innings.
He is a playful and odd character, an admitted goofball who swears that he is on a diet but will wander into the booth licking an ice cream cone. He might discourse on the proper way to execute a rundown one day, then discuss a recent liver flush the next.
“He said the bile was disgusting,” Darling said. Hernandez said he enjoyed an occasional liver flush’s health benefits but did it only in the off-season.
He is a baseball man having as much fun as possible short of winning the World Series. He is happily married. His wife, Kai; his three daughters; a granddaughter; his dog, Duncan; and cats are frequently mentioned, and sometimes seen, on the games.
“He’s our Ralph Kiner, our Phil Rizzuto,” Darling said. “He’s enjoying life a million times more than anybody else. He’s got it together.”
You could not predict Hernandez’s evolution into a character. As a player, he was so intense. As a broadcaster, he did not stand out until he arrived at SNY. In his previous years with MSG, he did not seem overly ambitious.
Still, he played a fascinating version of himself on “Seinfeld.”
“I didn’t work enough at MSG, and I never did full games,” he said. “I was gone after the sixth inning, like Rizzuto.”
He credits Gregg Picker, who produces the Mets games for SNY, with allowing his silly side to emerge, in a way that mirrors Leslie Nielsen’s liberation from serious leading man to deadpan comic actor in “Airplane!”
“Gregg doesn’t want the average broadcast,” Hernandez said. “He wants me to be quirky. I have Gregg encouraging me in my ear to be myself and Webby telling me not to become the class clown.” (Bill Webb directs the game broadcasts.)
A game with Hernandez will veer between baseball analysis and references to Douglas MacArthur, the Civil War, cartoons, his museum visits with Kai, “The Three Musketeers” (loved the book, disliked all the film versions), his beans-and-sprouts diet, his father or his achy quadriceps. An occasional motif in his commentary is drinking, which Hernandez knows a little bit about. Earlier this week, he castigated Cubs reliever Carlos Mármol for throwing too many sliders with a five-run lead.
“In our day,” he said, “cutting into our cocktail hour, I’d be all over him.”
Cohen is amused by doses of Hernandez unbound.
“I’d love to do a full brain scan on him, to find out what happens when he goes from Point A to Point B,” Cohen said. “It’s an absolute trip every day.”
Picker added, “I love that he broadcasts as if the mic were not on — which can be a slippery slope.”
That edge of candor was reached in the 2006 season when Hernandez spotted Kelly Calabrese, a full-time massage therapist for the San Diego Padres, sitting in the team’s dugout. “I won’t say that women belong in the kitchen,” he told Cohen, “but they don’t belong in the dugout.”
Hernandez later apologized. “I like to walk the line,” he said Thursday, “but I know how far I can go.”
Picker said, “Keith has no inhibitions about what he’ll say or admit to.”
A personality like Hernandez’s can be dangerous, bracing or just plain amusing.
“One time,” Picker said, “the number 44 came up and Gary and Ron were naming guys who wore 44 and Hank Aaron’s name came up. Keith said, ‘Hank Aaron wore 44. Really?’ ” Really.
Hernandez does not mind being corrected, as if being set straight on when a third baseman should guard the line were part of his quest to complete his life’s education.
But Darling said his partner and former teammate resisted harping too much on players’ lapses in their fundamentals. “He doesn’t pout, but he grabs my right arm or shakes it or writes down what should have been done,” he said.
Hernandez said that his 105-game schedule was enough. The 90-minute postgame trips home to the Hamptons from Shea Stadium are exhausting.
So he has packed up his East End home and is ready to return to his house in Jupiter, Fla. He will, as usual, read voraciously from his collection of 700 leather-bound Easton Press books. He will do so, for hours at a time, in his bathtub.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
― Dr Morbius, Monday, 29 September 2008 20:22 (fifteen years ago) link
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