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making you mad. Get him. Take it out on him.
He’s the one who’s gonna put you into a day job.
You wanna go to work nine to five and have
two weeks off a year? Then go ahead and do
what you’re doing. Or get mad at him. He’s the
one who’s gonna take the job away from you.
“Without another word, he got up and
walked to the other end of the dugout,”
Hernandez continues. “That was Lou’s
version of tough love.”
Part III of the book (“Consistency”)
focuses largely on Hernandez’s 1979 season,
with a pair of especially riveting chapters. In
one he reveals a conversation on a Cardinals
flight that he figures, thinking about it some
40 years later, rescued his career. In another,
he counts down the days in his race with
Rose for the batting title.
Sitting on a plane headed for Houston
on May 6, Hernandez was carrying a .236
average and, like many times in his early
days, plenty of self-doubt. Was his starting
job in jeopardy – reporters had wondered
if Roger Freed might get some time at first
- and was he really just a .250 hitter, and
nothing more? He wasn’t sure.
Soon, his manager wandered back from
first class and struck up a conversation. It
was Boyer, in his first full season on the job,
who previously had helped Hernandez find
himself and his swing during the stints at
Tulsa in ’74 and ’75. This time he’d help
with advice and assurance:
I’ve seen you hit, Keith, and I know that you
are something special. I knew that back in Tulsa.
And I’m telling you right now that you are my
first baseman. You’ll be in the lineup every day,
even if it costs me my job. So stop worrying. Go
out there and have fun, and do the things on the
field I know you’re capable of doing.
“They were the most important words
spoken to me over my career,” Hernandez
writes. “Without them, I think maybe
I wouldn’t have made it in the big leagues.
Who knows?”
In the first game of that series vs. the
Astros, Hernandez went 4-for-4 and never
looked back, pushing his average to .301
at the close of May and finally winding up
at .344 – 13 points better than Rose – by
season’s end. (Hernandez became the first
NL first baseman to win the title since
Musial, the Man he’d met as a boy, captured
it in 1957.) Not long afterward came the call
that he’d been voted co-MVP.
In the final chapters, Hernandez writes
that “I remember I felt on top of the world”
during the cross-country banquet circuit in
the offseason following his MVP award.
He admits he cheated on his first wifeduring that time, and confesses that he first
tried cocaine in 1980.
He closes with a visit to his parents,
in mid-May of the ’80 season, when the
Cardinals are playing at San Francisco. It’s
his first trip back since winning the MVP,
and his dad breaks out the projector to show
films his mom used to shoot when KeithGROWING UP A CARDINAL
When Hernandez won the batting title in 1979, he knew he could stand alongside the game’s
best, including Willie Stargell, with whom he shared MVP honors that season.