For Hernandez, Past and Future Clouded but Game Goes On

It would be easy to say that life was easier for Keith Hernandez back when he was sweet and 16. After all, he did not have to cope with the pressures of professional pennant races then.

Nor did he have to endure the disfavor of howling, scowling St. Louis baseball fans, who root-root-rooted when he played for the home team, but today feel betrayed.

Long gone are the good old days. Suddenly, upon his arrival here Tuesday night, Hernandez was neither a favorite nor prodigal son of this provincial Midwestern town. He was strictly a man in enemy uniform and a man who had disgraced himself on the witness stand of a Pittsburgh courtroom, where the true confessions of his cocaine romance were heard.

“A lot has happened,” he says. “A lot I would like to do over.”

You suspect that Keith Hernandez would like to be young again, to start fresh.

About all the first baseman had to do in his middle teens was hit line drives for his Capuchino High School team--liners that rang out loudly enough to be heard by all sorts of big-league scouts based in the greater San Francisco area.

How high Hernandez would have gone in the 1971 player draft, no one knows for sure, but once, when asked that very question, Hernandez himself pointed his index finger, his No. 1 finger, to the sky.

The ease of his manner in the infield and the consistency with which he struck a baseball were obvious to everyone who watched him.

It was particularly obvious to his father, John Hernandez, who once helped build a baseball diamond in a local housing development to give the neighborhood kids a better place to play, and to Keith’s older brother, Gary, who once was considered the family’s top prospect.

John and Gary had both dabbled in pro ball before Keith ever did, so they knew what sort of player he could be. What they did not know was that Keith was having some problems at school, something minor and typically schoolboyish. With little warning, the .500 hitter of junior year deserted the team as a senior, a rebel without much of a cause.

And down and down the draft well he fell. By the time the Cardinals finally claimed him, Hernandez felt resentful. He thought the baseball world was being awfully cruel to someone his age.

Determined to make good, he rose through the St. Louis organization. Men from the front office babbled that he could become another Stan Musial, and even the most skeptical Stan the Man fan had to consider that possibility after Hernandez, in his third full season, batted .344 and shared the National League’s Most Valuable Player award with Willie Stargell, Pittsburgh’s version of Musial.

Hernandez had been agitated by going so low in the draft and depressed by St. Louis fans’ general impatience, during his first two seasons, with his progress toward becoming Musial II. The city loved its old glories, relished its Gashouse Gang memories of Pepper Martin and Frankie Frisch and did not give its heart to newcomers easily. Once it gave, though, it gave all.

And so, when Hernandez won the batting title, he became accepted. And when he singled off his old Terra Nova High School rival, Bob McClure, with the bases loaded in the seventh game of the 1982 World Series against Milwaukee, Hernandez officially became both hero and champion.

No one cared anymore about anything bad that had happened--about his having gone hitless in the first 15 at-bats of the Series, for instance. Hernandez was as popular in St. Louis as redbirds and beer. He was here, it seemed, to stay.

Then Whitey Herzog, the manager, traded him to New York. He traded him to the Mets for Neil Allen, a mannequin-armed pitcher, and little else.

Nobody could figure it. And when somebody--Kenneth Moffett, by name--had the audacity to suggest drugs as motive, Hernandez’s hired mouthpiece screamed “Lawsuit!” and demanded a public apology, later granted.

It turns out that Hernandez was, indeed, doing dope at the time--that, if you believe Herzog, 11 of the 25 Cardinal players were doing dope at the time.

In an interview last week in Montreal, Herzog said his team was so hooked that once, when a Montreal batter was hit by a pitch, a St. Louis infielder approached the mound and told his pitcher to be careful because the Expo was one of the team’s top dope suppliers and should not be made angry.

On the stand last month, Hernandez even admitted playing a game under the influence. Upon returning to New York, he received a hero’s welcome on his way to home plate, in the same city where baseball fans booed the Canadian national anthem. Davey Johnson, the Met manager, said that although he had not wanted to see Hernandez booed, he had hardly wanted him to get a standing ovation.

Hernandez tried to get back to business. His team was in a title race, neck and neck with his friends from St. Louis. On a trip to Los Angeles, Hernandez issued his own public apology for the wrong he had done, but upon returning home he was confronted with the scalding opinions of newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, who wrote that if there were any justice in the world, Hernandez would be sent to the pen with all the crooks who didn’t play first base.

“I didn’t read it,” Hernandez said, leaving it at that. He knew he had done wrong. He knew he was going to hear about it. And he knew it would get worse. There was the trip to St. Louis ahead of him, the one where the winner of the National League East race would be determined once and for all.

Tuesday was the first time that Hernandez had set foot in the shadow of the giant arch since his testimony. “I know the Mets won’t get a warm reception,” Hernandez said. “As for me, personally, I don’t know.”

He could control things on the field. There, he is hitting .301 with 87 RBIs, 12 more than have been delivered by, say, Darryl Strawberry, who has 28 home runs to Hernandez’s 10. But that is the sort of clutch hitter that Hernandez almost always has been.

The question now is what sort of hitting he will do in the future. The courts may be finished with Hernandez, but perhaps the baseball commissioner is not, and certainly the baseball fans of St. Louis are not.

“I’m not concentrating on anything but baseball right now,” Hernandez said. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is uncertain. There is not much else he can say.