If At First... – Keith Hernandez & Mike Bryan [Updated 1987 Edition] ★★★★

Game-by-Game with Captain Clutch

No sport tests endurance like baseball. There are 162 games in a season, not counting the postseason. Each game consists of nine innings, with a possibility for unlimited extra innings. Even marathons have finishing lines; not so baseball.

Baseball can be as much a mental drag as a physical one, especially when you have a divorce and drug accusations hanging over your head. Such was the case for Keith Hernandez in 1985, the season chronicled in this memoir.

The guy could flat-out hit, and fielded so well he won more Golden Gloves (11) than any other first-baseman. In 1985, he even set a record for most game-winning runs batted in, a briefly-employed statistic designed to measure that elusive baseball skill known as clutch hitting.

Hernandez saw himself as a clutch hitter, yet with reservations. “I do love these clutch situations – but I love them more when I’m swinging the bat well,” he writes after one game when he didn’t.

Hernandez on defense: “There’s no comparison, for me, between fielding and hitting: Fielding is all instincts and reflexes; hitting is the real challenge, because talent is not enough.”
Image from https://www.si.com/vault/1986/10/13/114142/hes-still-not-home-free-the-mets-brilliant-first-baseman-and-team-leader-keith-hernandez-an-indispensable-man-in-the-playoffs-must-as-always-deal-with-doubts-and-demons-and-a-love-hate-relationship-with-his-father.

Doubt can’t help but creep into your life when you struggle at the plate. During a long slump, Hernandez ponders his situation:

Look at it: I’m a career .300 hitter. There are only a dozen of us active in the major leagues today. Yet I’m capable of wondering if I’ll hit again. I can even wonder how good I was in the first place. I can twist myself into a Gordian knot of doubts.

A decade later, Hernandez would be able to make himself feel better in an episode of “Seinfeld” by reminding himself: “I’m Keith Hernandez.” In 1985, he wasn’t so cocky. Cool, yes, and snarky, too; this Keith Hernandez isn’t too far removed from the retired legend who has made a second career as an opinionated celebrity commentator.

But he was still proving himself, even after winning a World Series ring in 1982. Perhaps that’s why the title implies a kind of failure.

For 1985 would not be the greatest season for either Hernandez or the New York Mets he played for that season. Both did well; Hernandez winning National League Player of the Month honors for his second time ever in July and the Mets winning 98 games, fourth-most in team history. But there was no postseason for them; in the 1980s only division champs advanced to the playoffs. In 1985 the St. Louis Cardinals, the team which traded Hernandez away in 1983, managed to do better without him than the Mets did with him.

Hernandez in his past life as a St. Louis Cardinal. His Most Valuable Player Award in 1979 and his first of two World Championships came while he wore Cardinal red. But a dysfunctional relationship with manager Whitey Herzog recounted in If At First... sent Hernandez packing in exchange for relief pitcher Neil Allen.
Image from https://www.sicovers.com/keith-hernandez-of-the-cardinals-1980-april-07

Co-written with Mike Bryan, who also shared authorship of Hernandez’s later tome Pure Baseball: Pitch By Pitch For The Advanced Fan, If At First… is much different in focus and content, more driven by Hernandez’s cagey, bemused personality. Organized as a series of short reflections on each game played that season, If At First… affords a peek into a player’s diary, one given to chattering about himself as much as the game he plays.

He’s not an especially effusive or even likable character, but he’s candid and refuses to tow whatever line is expected of him. That makes Hernandez interesting. Take his former use of cocaine, which caught up to him in 1985 in the form of public testimony after his name came up in a Major League Baseball investigation:

I’ve used cocaine. I don’t anymore. That period of my life didn’t damage my career in baseball, but I made my own bed during those years – 1980, ’81, and ’82 – and this year, I’ll have to sleep in it with the whole world watching.

Or the fans at a game in Houston:

I’m not out for cheap shots, but the [Astro]Dome fans are weak. Hell, even the cabbie who brought me to the stadium said the best night for him is a 4-0 game (either way) in the fifth inning. He’ll get his first customer that early, and a steady stream will follow for the rest of the night.

He sums up his attitude about autograph seekers thusly: “I won’t sign baseball cards for forty-year-old guys. Grow up, fellas.”

Ouch. What If At First… lacks in depth it makes up for in bite.

Hernandez wasn't a hothead, but he could get in an umpire's face at times. He singles out one officiating crew as having it in for him in If At First..., but on the whole claims respect for the guys in blue.
Image from https://metsmerizedonline.com/2014/10/a-bag-of-balls-a-lot-of-questions.html/

It also offers splendid analysis about the game and the way it is played:

In a slump, we feel we have to swing at the pitch if it’s a strike, to avoid getting behind in the count. Because we’re not sure we’ll hit any pitch at all, we have to swing at more of them, helping our odds. But of course this really hurts our odds, because we’re swinging at worse pitches. It’s a cruel dilemma.

In terms of candor, If At First… is not about burning bridges. This isn’t Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, naming names about all the womanizing and boozing behind the scenes. The only person he singles out in either category is himself.

Hernandez cops to a badly-kept secret in If At First..., smoking cigarettes during ballgames. It was a Major League no-no then as now. Usually he wasn't this obvious about it.
Image from http://www.sheastadiumseats.com/id69.html

But Hernandez does dish in other ways. He calls attention to the mistakes as well as the accomplishments of his Mets teammates. Outfielder Darryl Strawberry may be a great hitter and underappreciated fielder in Hernandez’s telling here, but he is betrayed at times by a soft attitude. Catcher Gary Carter is a heroic figure carrying the team for much of the season on a bad knee, but a cringey showboater, too.

He also questions some of his manager Davey Johnson’s decisions, though not always justly:

The announced reason for removing Dwight [Gooden] is that he had thrown over 140 pitches, while striking out eleven Expos. I understand, but couldn’t he throw ten or fifteen more? This game is important.

Send out your team’s ace to throw 155 pitches today, and you rightly get fired. Even back then, Hernandez was what they call “old-school.”

A couple of Hernandez defensive gems from his Mets days.
GIF from https://tenor.com/search/keith-hernandez-gifs.

Hernandez saves most of his sharpest digs for himself. He spends more ink itemizing bad plate appearances than anything else, and calls attention to games where he didn’t perform up to his expectations. Often he offers up an excuse, then dismisses it.

At one point he writes about making a drunk spectacle of himself at a restaurant. “What the hell is wrong with me?” he asks.

What drove Hernandez? Hernandez credits his father for not just pushing him to succeed in the majors but helping him stay there. In 1985, he gave his son pointers on his batting stance that helped Keith break out of his worst-ever slump. But Pop Hernandez seems a hard man to please, at least as Keith tells it, fault-finding to a fault.

While basically a game-by-game journal, Hernandez and Bryan are less chroniclers than commentators. Hernandez makes some general observations about specific game situations, and keeps it light throughout. Often he plugs his buddies on the team: pinch-hitter Rusty Staub, veteran pitcher Ed Lynch, and young pitching star Ron Darling, though Darling, his future broadcast partner for a decade of Mets games and counting, comes off as a riddle:

Most of the guys don’t pick up the beat of his drummer. He went to Yale and can prove it in his conversation. He wears the ultra-latest clothes… He’s sort of a loner. He’s my good friend.

Since 2006, Hernandez (on left) has been broadcasting Mets games on television alongside his old playing partner Ron Darling (on right.) The two have now been around the Mets longer in the booth than on the field.
Image from https://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/mets/ron-darling-keith-hernandez-qualified-to-be-a-critic-of-mets-hitting-philosophy-1.8209467

One thing that makes If At First… a fine read for me is that it is set in 1985, rather than the following season, 1986, when Hernandez and the Mets won the World Series.

Nineteen hundred and eighty-six was boring in retrospect until you got to the postseason, a sad fact proved in a supplementary chapter included in later editions of If At First… offering “the exclusive inside story” of the 1986 season.

As a Mets fan, it’s hard to claim that a World Championship actually detracts from a book’s merit, but it does here. Hernandez immersed me so much in the experience of a team on the verge in 1985 that a briefer summation of the same team’s triumph in 1986 is anticlimactic.

I preferred the 1985 edition of the Mets anyway. In 1985, the Mets had to struggle, and ultimately lost; despite the pitching greatness of Gooden, who went 24-4 and led the majors in strikeouts and earned-run average. The pesky Cardinals, managed by the same guy who traded Hernandez, Whitey Herzog, proved too much:

The Cards have showed a lot more come-from-behind capability this year than we have. The Mets have to rely on long extra-base hits, which are harder to come by than singles, harder yet in the clutch. We’re more of a get-ahead, stay-ahead team.

But 1985 had highlights as well. Hernandez tells about the night in Atlanta where he hit for the cycle while playing in a game that lasted 19 innings and ended at four in the morning, capped by a fireworks show (it was played on the Fourth of July).  Late in the game, Hernandez snuck into the clubhouse to call his girlfriend: “If I’m playing baseball at this hour, at least you can be awake,” he told her.

Hernandez kept me awake throughout his book; perhaps because I remember the team he played for. Still, If At First… is entertaining and insightful enough to be worth anyone’s time. Baseball is fun.