NEW YORK — Just as the deadline day trade of Tom Seaver had ended a long competitive era for the Mets, the deal six years later for Keith Hernandez started one.
Hernandez’s No. 17 will be enshrined Saturday afternoon on Citi Field’s left-field façade — just the fourth player in Mets history to earn that honor, following Tom Seaver, Mike Piazza and Jerry Koosman. (Managers Casey Stengel and Gil Hodges have done so as well.) He’ll be the first player so honored from the best team in franchise history, the 1986 champions.
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Hernandez earned that distinction with his tenure as a player for the Mets over six and a half seasons — a time in which the franchise transformed from a half-decade of losing into the preeminent force in the National League. During Hernandez’s tenure in Queens, no major-league team won more games than the Mets.
Hernandez made three All-Star teams, had three top-eight MVP finishes and won five Gold Gloves while with the Mets. He’s third in franchise history in batting average and on-base percentage, 10th in RBIs.
He’s furthered his legacy in Queens with a second career with the team, as a broadcaster for SNY since 2006. That’s endeared him to more generations of Mets fans, as he’s now been connected to the organization for most of the last 40 years.
“Keith has become a bit of a lifer,” said his former teammate, pitcher Bob Ojeda. “People know him across the spectrum.”
What his teammates know him as is a captain, an intense, everyday presence, and the spark of the best stretch of baseball the Mets ever played.
“The path to the World Series championship in 1986,” said Ed Lynch, a pitcher on that team, “really started on June 15, 1983, when we got Keith.”
In honor of No. 17, here are 17 stories about Hernandez’s impact on the Mets, as a player, a captain, a broadcaster and a Mets icon.
1.
Ed Lynch (Mets pitcher, 1980-1986): I was there the day he came over. He asked for No. 37; that was his number with the Cardinals. And they told him no. He looked at them funny. And they said, “That’s Casey Stengel’s number.” So now he comes over, he takes 17, and that’s getting retired also.
2.
Hernandez has long joked that the Cardinals wanted to trade him to Siberia — and that the early 1980s Mets fit the bill.
Lynch: When he first got there, I remember looking across the clubhouse at him, he was unpacking his bags, I think we’re in Montreal, and I’m thinking, “Boy, you poor son of a bitch. What have you gotten yourself into?”
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Doug Sisk (Mets pitcher, 1982-1987): It was brutal. You know that? If it wasn’t for Opening Day, there was nothing to get too excited about as far as fans.
When I was called up from Double A in Jackson (in 1982) to go play Pittsburgh, the Pirates were honoring Willie Stargell and have a sold-out ballclub. And then I come to Shea Stadium, it was like, “Oh my God. There’s more ushers than there was people in the stands.”
The attendance at Sisk’s first home game in the majors in September ’82 was 8,622.
Sisk: (Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog) must have wanted him gone. He did a very bad thing in trading him to a team in their division. That’s the worst thing you ever want to do. That’s going to come back and bite you in the ass every time.
Bob Ojeda (Mets pitcher, 1986-1990): Keith was the perfect guy because he came over here as somewhat of damaged goods, if you will. I don’t mean that as an insult, but his time in St. Louis ended on a sour note with Whitey. He came over here and it was a rebirth for him as well, and he embraced that. He came over as a veteran but with a rookie mentality.
3.
Hernandez re-signed with the Mets following the ’83 season. He’s long cited the influence of his father, John, in the decision, because he told Hernandez about all the young players the Mets had coming up through the system. What would that core have looked like without Hernandez?
Lynch: It would have been devastating, because we lost Seaver at the end of ’83. Seaver was that guy on the pitching staff that led by example. And if Keith decided not to re-sign at the end of ’83, it would have been chaos around there with all those great young players coming up and no leader. It would have been a void.
Sisk: I think it was the greatest choice he ever made to stay in New York and play for the Mets.
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Hernandez: I got traded to a last-place team and no one at the ballpark. And it turned out to be such a life-changing event for me in such a positive way.
4.
Lynch: When you’re on losing teams, losing becomes a very comfortable place to be. We’d go out, we’d lose by a run, and after the game guys would be like, “Well, we gave it our best shot. We played hard, we lost, where we going to eat?”
By spring training in ’84, every loss is a personal insult; every loss is like somebody walking up to your mother and bitch-slapping her. That’s the feeling you had, that losing is not tolerated.
Howard Johnson (Mets infielder, 1985-1993): He was the main guy on the team. Everybody flowed through him. He basically was the conductor. He made it go … He was the guy whose voice carried the most weight.
Lynch: He was the glue that held that thing all together and got us all going in the same direction. And he didn’t do it with words, he did it with actions … When you have a guy like that, you see what’s possible. He showed us what was possible.
Ojeda: You could tell he was in charge. Everyday player, veteran player filled with a bunch of youngsters running around like madmen. You had to have some adults in the room.
Ron Darling (Mets pitcher, 1983-1991, and broadcast partner, 2006-present): He just brought a winning culture in the way he moved and the way he acted and the way he played. He brought it every single night, and that rubbed off on all the young players. His intensity — it seemed like he wanted it more than you.
Sisk: As many games as he played at the major-league level, you thought at some point it would wear off, the novelty of winning. But no, not with him. He was intense, and that’s why he was the captain.
5.
Sisk: The intensity, especially against the Cardinals, he was just screaming and yelling. He hated them. His voice was hoarse at the end of the game … It was all balls out against those guys.
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Ojeda: The beauty of this was, that was the team for us to beat. It was very poignant the way that lined up. It was the perfect storm for a guy who had a chip on his shoulder, had something to prove and went out and did it against the team he needed to do it against.
6.
Lynch: He posted up every day. He wasn’t like, “Hey, Nolan Ryan’s pitching, my hamstring hurts” kind of thing. I never saw him do that … That gives your word substance. It’s not just a bunch of words flying around a room. You’re not a politician making a speech; you’re a soldier out there digging your foxhole, and attacking the enemy. It gave his message depth and substance because a lot of guys talk a good game, but he played a good game.
Ojeda: His intensity, being an everyday player — you know a pitcher can’t really do that. You need an everyday guy in the lineup, and we had that in Keith. When they’re on the field every day and they’re intense and they’re playing like they’ve got something to prove, to have that with Keith’s talent and desire to win was vitally important. You need that to push a team to the next level and find that other gear, and that’s exactly what happened in ’86.
Sisk: If he made a bad play, he just fessed up to it. He always would. That’s part of the maturity of the young players. When they get their butts kicked, they don’t want to talk to the press, they don’t want to talk to anybody. Keith would talk to everybody.
7.
Sisk: We were playing in San Francisco. Keith was not playing that day. His brother lived there, they were going to have dinner after the day game, so they decided to give him the day off. We got into a tie game in the eighth or ninth inning, we pinch-hit Hernandez. It was Mark Davis he was hitting off of, a left-hander who throws a lot of curveballs. The Mex said, “If he throws me anything other than a curveball, I’m going to look really bad. But if throws me a curveball, I’m going to put it in the upper deck.” And I’ll be damned if he didn’t do that. We ended up winning that ballgame.
8.
Lynch: We were in St. Louis. And that was an incredibly tough place to get a bunt down because they had that fast turf and they were aggressive. I didn’t get a bunt down. And it pissed him off, because we lost the game. It wasn’t because of that. But it was just an example of doing the little things right, and he jumped my ass pretty good. And that’s when I said, “Wow, this is a whole different ballgame here.”
It pisses you off, but then you know what you do the next day? You’re in the cage working on your bunting. That’s leadership — not guys patting you on the back all the time, but guys who aren’t afraid to kick you in the ass. He had the legitimacy to do that.
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Sisk: If you didn’t bust your ass to first base after he dived to get the ball to you, it was going to look really bad.
Darling: I was probably raised a lot like Keith, was with a father who taught me how to play the game and how to play it correctly. Until I watched him play, I didn’t know it could be played that correctly.
(Wilbur Funches / File / Associated Press)9.
It’s impossible to discuss Hernandez without lauding his defensive acumen at first base. There may be no other position on the diamond with as strong a consensus for the best defender to play it. Hernandez is almost universally recognized as the finest defensive first baseman the sport has ever seen. His teammates mainly remembered how he defused bunt plays.
Johnson: He would tell me to stay home. “I’ll be there and the ball’s coming to you.” Sure enough, that’s the way things would turn out. He just had a very keen intuition of the game and what was going on on the field.
Lynch: He used to harp on us about defense: “Let’s make it tough on them.” I would work on throwing a changeup and running as hard as I could to the third-base line. And here comes Keith right behind me. And nine times out of 10, the guy would bunt it right to me. We had quite a few 1-5-4 double plays.
Johnson: That made it very tough on National League teams. That’s National League baseball, and he was the antidote to it.
10.
Johnson: Keith always had a little something that wasn’t in the scouting report, for the pitchers, for the infielders. He just had an intuition about what was going to happen … There was never a reason to doubt him. Never.
Lynch: Not only he would tell you what you need to do, but he’s going to tell you how the pitchers going to try to prevent you from doing it. So he gave you not only the result, but he gave you the plan to get to that result.
Ojeda: The knowledge of the league, which he’d been in for a while, the knowledge of the other hitters, the willingness to know about the other manager’s strategy, the nuances of the game, the minutiae of who’s hitting, who’s running, their tendencies — it all added up to a wealth of knowledge over there that you could draw on. And I did draw on it at times, no question.
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Johnson: He would always give you a plan. Everything he did on the field, there was a plan behind it that was well thought out, and I swear he was right every time.
11.
Ojeda: We spent a lot of time, all of us, talking about the game. We didn’t just play the game and go home. We played the game and hung out in the locker room; that was one of our favorite things to do. And we didn’t hang out in the locker room talking about golf. We talked about the game that night, the game coming up, who we’re facing, who the hitters are. That was fun to us. It wasn’t a forced effort. No, it was, “Let’s have a beer and talk about the game.” You could just cull all this information from a guy who’d been in the league for a while, which was priceless … It becomes this bonding thing as a team, which does not mean loving everybody. But it means you have a common goal, and you’re united in that common goal.
Evidently, that habit continued on a smaller scale when Hernandez was a broadcaster with one of his successors as team captain.
David Wright (Mets third baseman, 2004-2018): Especially after losses or tough games, I’d go into our traveling secretary’s office, it was quiet, to just kind of decompress and think about the game. It was my way of leaving the game at the field. (Keith) came in to maybe get away and do the same thing, just for some peace and quiet. And a lot of times we were in there together, we’d just start talking about the game. And it’s shooting back and forth as to what we did right, what we did wrong, what I did right, what I could do better, different at-bats, how pitchers tried to attack me.
It was always good to hear his opinion on, not just mechanics and things like that, but: What were you thinking? What were you trying to accomplish? What was your game plan going into that at-bat?
For me, it was obviously a tremendous thrill to get a chance to sit around and talk baseball with Keith Hernandez. If you would have told a 15-year-old me that one day I’d be sitting in the New York Mets clubhouse after a game talking situational hitting with Keith Hernandez? That’s crazy. Even today, it brings a smile on my face, just thinking about it. What’s happening? How did I get to this point?
12.
Lynch: He gave us an image — a swashbuckling, devil-may-care, damn the torpedoes, full-speed ahead image. And New Yorkers loved that. I mean, we would walk into restaurants and he’d get a standing ovation. That’s stuff you tell your grandkids.
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13.
Sisk: He loved the B52s. We had it cranked on the airplane one time, and he came out of nowhere, and we didn’t know he liked the music, and he just started signing it. We were like, “Where did this man come from?” He sang the song like he knew every word to it. It might have been “Rock Lobster.” If that doesn’t get a team loose, nothing would.
14.
After retiring following one season with Cleveland in 1990, Hernandez stayed away from baseball for years. But he did make one memorable appearance in the pop culture zeitgeist: his guest-starring role in a two-part 1992 episode of “Seinfeld” as “The Boyfriend.”
Hernandez: That was the second year of the show when I did that episode. And evidently the first year the show didn’t really take off. Larry David told me a year later that they knew that they had a really good script and they wanted to use it on sweeps week. And it was all going to revolve around me; if I was a dud, or a stiff, it was going to be a half-hour show and they weren’t going to use it on sweeps.
Evidently, I passed the grade. They used it on sweeps and they felt that the show took off after that episode.
15.
Hernandez got back into baseball in the late 1990s as an occasional broadcaster for the Mets. He made the jump to full-time with SNY in 2006.
Darling: This might be gaining momentum as far as when it happened, but I swear it was a minute before we went on air for the first time, and Keith turned to me: “You do the pitching, I do the hitting. That’s it.”
That simple sentence took care of all the traffic that’s an issue with a three-man booth. That’s how we do it.
16.
Darling: Keith is good at what he does because organically, he’s just original. There’s no one I’ve ever met like him, and that originality comes out in our broadcast. I’m not original. There’s a lot of announcers that do it better or worse, but I’m cut from a kind of mold of announcing. Keith’s not like that at all. Keith thinks of things. And he also has something that’s very hard to have: He has great comedic talent and timing. You don’t teach that.
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Gary Cohen (broadcast partner, 2006-present): I don’t lead Keith into his Civil War and Frank Zappa references. He gets there himself.
17.
The night Wright played his final game for the Mets, he joined Hernandez and Cohen in the booth. Hernandez had paid him a special compliment earlier, saying Wright could have played for the 1986 Mets. He paused for the punchline: “You might hit seventh.”
Wright: He can’t give a compliment without it being a back-handed compliment.
As a kid, my dad, before I knew anything about the Mets, he would always wear this old New York Mets jacket. That was kind of my first introduction to the Mets, and then it slowly grew to where he takes us out to minor-league games. And if we’re lucky once a year, they’d make the guys travel down to Norfolk to play an exhibition game on one of their off days, and we’d get a chance to go to that game and watch the guys that I watched on TV. It was always a big deal.
Although I was probably too young to remember anything about a lot of those ’86 games, my dad wearing the jacket I remember vividly. So, yeah, when the captain of that team says, “Hey, you know, you could play for us,” it’s this kind of passing of the torch. As a player that appreciates history and appreciates what the players have done for him, I take that as a badge of honor.
(Top photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
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