102 CARDINALS MAGAZINE @CardsMagazine
was playing youth ball. Hernandez watches
himself, his stance and his swing as an
11-year-old, and listens as his dad tells him
that’s when he knew Keith was special.
“I was stunned,” Hernandez writes. “Seeing
Dad behind the projector, so proud of what
he was showing on the screen, I realized why
he’d been so hard on me. ... I might have
won the batting title and MVP in 1979, but
Dad had seen the potential years before.”
BUCK WAS ‘IN HIS CORNER’
A sequel isn’t out of the question. If the
book does well, Hernandez told Cardinals
Magazine he has plenty of material for
another.
In it, he’d write about the ’82 Cardinals
championship team and his acknowledged
regret over a cocaine dependency he says he
kicked before Herzog traded him to
the Mets in June 1983. He’d address
baseball’s drug trials in Pittsburgh in 1985
(Hernandez was among several major
leaguers called to testify against those who
had provided them cocaine), and winning
another ring in New York in ’86.
“Anything that’s on the record, I’ll have
to address,” Hernandez said. “The second
book would have to deal with Whitey, and
the Pittsburgh trials, and it would deal with
the ’82 World Series, and then on to my
New York years, and post (career).
“I must say (the drug use and Pittsburgh
trials) are not my shining moment; that
period of my life probably was the greatest
mistake I ever made. I feel a little bit
ashamed of it. But you know, it is what it is,
you can’t turn the clock back.”
These days, Hernandez says people are
“lovely” when he comes back to St. Louis;
he credits Buck with “rehabilitating him
with Cardinals fans” in the weeks and years
after the trade. “I have friends in St. Louis
who listened (to the broadcasts),” he said.
“And as everything transpired after I was
gone, they said Jack Buck was absolutely in
my corner. For that I’ll be forever grateful.
I love Jack; he was a wonderful man.”He also has no shortage of praise for
Cardinals brass and teammates who were
there for him, with a pat on the back or
kick in the pants, during his growth as a
ballplayer and person.
“Look at what Bob Kennedy did with me
in Double-A,” Hernandez said. “Instead of
leaving me there to die on the vine, or sending
me down, he sent me up. That’s just a pure-
gut baseball guy, eyes-on, who knew I had the
talent. Had some stiff-shirt analytics guy been
looking at my numbers, I might have been
sent down, it might have destroyed me.
“The fact (is) I struggled: I struggled my
first two years in the minor leagues, A-ball
and Double-A, and struggled in the big
leagues for three years. So, it wasn’t a yellow
brick road.”
But, a road well-traveled, taking him to a
book Cardinals fans will find compelling.Joe Ostermeier is a free-lance writer and
president of the St. Louis chapter of the
Baseball Writers’ Association of America.GROWING UP A CARDINAL
Fans young and old wanted to grab Hernandez’s coattails and go for the ride after the Cardinals won the World Series in 1982, but the story
of that season and beyond isn’t told in this book. If there is a sequel, Hernandez says, he’ll address ’82, his trade, Whitey Herzog and more.