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Summary
Summary
Legendary first baseman Keith Hernandez tells all in this gripping literary memoir and New York Times bestseller.
Keith Hernandez revolutionized the role of first baseman. During his illustrious career with the World Series-winning St. Louis Cardinals and New York Mets, he was a perennial fan favorite, earning eleven consecutive Gold Gloves, a National League co-MVP Award, and a batting title. But it was his unique blend of intelligence, humor, and talent -- not to mention his unflappable leadership, playful antics, and competitive temperament -- that transcended the sport and propelled him to a level of renown that few other athletes have achieved, including his memorable appearances on the television show Seinfeld .
Now, with a striking mix of candor and self-reflection, Hernandez takes us along on his journey to baseball immortality. There are the hellacious bus rides and south-of-the-border escapades of his minor league years. His major league benchings, unending plate adjustments, and role in one of the most exciting batting races in history against Pete Rose.
Indeed, from the Little League fields of Northern California to the dusty proving grounds of triple-A ball to the grand stages of Busch Stadium and beyond, I'm Keith Hernandez reveals as much about America's favorite pastime as it does about the man himself. What emerges is an honest and compelling assessment of the game's past, present, and future: a memoir that showcases one of baseball's most unique and experienced minds at his very best.
Author Notes
Keith Hernandez was born on October 20, 1953 in San Francisco, California. He is a former first baseman who played most of his career with the World Series-winning Major League teams, St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets. Some of his other awards include earning eleven consecutive Gold Gloves and the National League co-MVP Award. After retiring from the game, he has worked in television broadcasting as an analyst on Mets telecasts for the SNY, WPIX, and MSG networks and is a member of the FOX Sports MLB postseason studio team. He is the author of If at First: A Season with the Mets (1986), Pure Baseball: Pitch by Pitch for the Advanced Fan (1994), First-Base Hero (2005), Shea Good-Bye: The Untold Inside Story of the Historic 2008 Season (2009), Mookie: Life, Baseball, and the '86 Mets (2014), and I'm Keith Hernandez: A Memoir (2018)
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the introduction to his entertaining memoir, two-time World Series Champion and five-time All-Star Keith Hernandez claims he didn't want to write a "boring" baseball book. Mission accomplished, as the outspoken first baseman-turned-broadcaster covers the highlights from his impressive career trajectory, beginning with the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1970s and his game-by-game battle against Pete Rose for the 1979 batting crown and continuing with dalliances with prostitutes and cocaine. Hernandez, now 64, retired in 1990 after spending most of his career with the Cardinals and later the New York Mets, with one final season in Cleveland. He focuses almost entirely on his years in the Cardinals organization (they were "the most instructive," he writes), while also discussing his opponents and his post-baseball career as a color analyst on Mets' telecasts. Frustrated with how long today's games are, the use of sabermetrics, and the impact of league expansion, Hernandez brings a witty veteran's view to today's game ("call me old fashioned," he tells readers before stating an opinion). These observations, however, along with his bar-conversation writing style and self-deprecating humor, will appeal to baseball fans of any era. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A former major league baseball All-Star and MVPand current TV analyst for the New York Metsreviews his boyhood and the dawn of his professional career and reveals some of the secrets of his success.Although Hernandez claims that he doesn't want his text to be like other baseball memoirs, in fundamental ways, it is exactly that. The author provides game-by-game accounts, descriptions of influences (good and bad and mixed), and details about influential managers such as Ken Boyer and fellow players, including Pete Rosethough the author does not comment on the Rose exclusion-from-the-Hall-of-Fame controversy. We learn about Hernandez's Spanish heritage (though his teammates called him "Mex"), his flirtation with drugs, his sometimes-excessive drinking, and his struggles with his father, who trained him but ultimately couldn't let go. But in his style, Hernandez does distinguish himself, offering a variety of chapters: flashbacks to boyhood (italicized), accounts of his current occupation as a broadcaster, and details about his journey through the minor leagues and into MLB, where, after experiencing some difficulties and frustrations, he soon emerged as a major talent. He alternates the chapters, shifting readers from past to present to past again, and he pauses periodically to elaborate on certain elements of today's game that annoy him: the obsession with home runs and the consequent shrinking of baseball parks and the soaring influence of statistics (see Moneyball). Hernandez concludes one minitirade with this: "Boring, one-base-at-a-time, home-run baseball. Yuck." We also learn some things about the author that may surprise readerse.g., he likes to draw, and he collects first editions and works of art. Refreshingly, he also blames himself for the dissolution of his first marriage, confessing that he cheated on his young wife.Often candid and even self-deprecating memories by an athlete who once stood at the summit of his profession. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
KEITH HERNANDEZ DOESN'T like baseball memoirs. "It feels like they've become a paint-by-numbers exercise," the former first baseman laments at the outset of his own entry in the genre. He's confident you know about the time the 1986 Mets won the World Series. He doesn't want to trot out the old war stories. What he offers instead is an impressionistic account of his baseball boyhood, a kind of "Remembrance of At-Bats Past," complete with a baked good to set the memories in motion. When Hernandez was growing up in Pacifica, Calif., his father worked as a fireman. After an overnight shift, he would bring home fresh sourdough bread from a bakery in San Francisco. It was "soft on the inside with a crust that made your teeth work just the right amount." Hernandez aspires for his book to be like that bread: "Something that you set your teeth into and say, 'Keith, that's pretty good. More, please.' " I'M KEITH HERNANDEZ: A Memoir (Little, Brown, $28) IS by turns crusty and soft. It's pretty good, too. If you've ever listened to Hernandez in his current capacity as a color man for the Mets, you know that he can be unapologetically cranky. He eyes with suspicion the statistics wizards now found in every team's front office. "It's no wonder, NASA, your space program is stalled," he writes. "All the smart kids went into baseball management." But he cuts the crustiness with a surprising soft side. Hernandez cries in this book - kind of a lot. He cries when fans razz him during ?-ball. He cries when he gets sent back to Triple-A after a cup of coffee in the bigs. He cries when he gets called up again but rides the pine. Don't these fans and managers know he's Keith Hernandez? But he's not yet Keith Hernandez - not a National League M.V.P. or a bon vivant who dines at Elaine Kaufman's and dates Elaine Benes - and therein lies the pleasure of the book. For most of its pages, Hernandez alternates between glimpses of his childhood and scenes from his days as a prospect in the St. Louis Cardinals organization. As a boy, he is taught the game by his father, who played ball with Stan Musial in the Navy. The elder Hernandez is by turns nurturing and imperious, the kind of father who builds a makeshift batting cage in the garage so he can critique his kid's swing. He can make Earl Woods seem laid-back. In the chapters devoted to Hernandez's minor-league years, we follow along as he struggles to meet another set of lofty expectations, those that attach to a top prospect. Hernandez writes honestly about his struggles - with pro pitching, with a Kahlua-swilling roommate, with being a kid far from home. The best stretches feel a bit like Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," only less glamorous. Some of Hernandez's stories have a tail-tale quality - one senses this material was workshopped during long bus rides between Texas League ballparks. At one such park, in Midland-Odessa, the local team has just installed new lights, which help Hernandez make out the pitcher's stuff but also attract "the region's vast tarantula population." Only after the grounds crew dispatches the spiders with long rakes can the game resume. Elsewhere, Hernandez is the rake. His Triple-A debut is marred by having to confess to his new manager that he's contracted a venereal disease. (After two shots of penicillin in the posterior, he still makes the start.) Road-tripping home from his sophomore season with the Cards, he contracts scabies from a young lady in Denver, or possibly from her large wolfhound. Some amount of hanky-panky is to be expected - this is baseball. Eventually, though, the boys-will-be-boys escapades shade into something that feels uncomfortably like bedpost notching. No more, please. Susan Jacoby is a Mets fan. This independent scholar and author of acclaimed histories of American secularism and the barnstorming 19th-century agnostic Robert Ingersoll believes in the team from Flushing. Her faith in baseball, however, has been shaken. The assertive title of her new book, why baseball matters (Yale University, $26), belies the author's concern that it might not matter, or not for long. Baseball, Jacoby writes, is a sport beset on one side by digital distractions inimical to the long bouts of concentration it demands and on the other by reformers who would sacrifice baseball's essence to persuade a young audience to log off and play ball. Jacoby is right to be concerned - a cord-cutting, smartphone-wielding generation of fans threatens to upend the business models of all the major sports, and baseball, with its antique traditions and languorous games, is in particularly dire condition. Recent strokes of good luck - the Cubs' dramatic World Series win, for example - have papered over a steady decline in attendance, as well as the graying of baseball's (very white) fan base. If the sport is to remain relevant, however, it will need more open-minded emissaries than Jacoby. "I do not think that everything about the game was better several decades ago," she insists in her introduction; she claims, throughout the book, that her views are not colored by nostalgia. But her reader will be hard-pressed to find much about the sport's present she prefers to its past. She adopted the Mets - after a Chicagoland childhood spent rooting for the White Sox - in part because she considers the designated hitter to be an abomination. To demonstrate her progressivism, she registers her disdain for the reserve clause, repealed in 1975. As a historian, Jacoby appreciates that baseball's stakeholders have often mistaken cultural and technological upheavals as the death knell for our pastoral pastime. Team owners thought radio would eat into their ticket sales. Instead, it expanded the sport's reach and made a burbling ballgame one of the sounds of the American summer. But when Jacoby regards Major League Baseball's innovative app, or the nerdy pleasures of fantasy baseball, she apparently sees not a point of entry for a new cohort of wired fans but an end to the analog era she would preserve in amber. If Jacoby is right and the American mind will soon be too addled for a three-hour baseball game, perhaps we'll all just become rodeo fans. By rule, a bronco ride lasts a mere eight seconds - and that's if the rider manages to stay on his horse. As readers learn in John Branch's remarkable new book, THE LAST COWBOYS: A Pioneer Family in the New West (Norton, $26.95), even the greatest bronc riders frequently find themselves in the dust well before time is up. Branch's book chronicles the Wright family, a sprawling brood of Utahans enjoying an unprecedented run of domination in the sport's saddle-bronc division. Cody, the eldest boy among Bill and Evelyn Wright's 13 children, is a twotime world champion. His brothers Jesse and Spencer have also taken home bronc riding's grand prize: a gold belt buckle. Shortly before the book went to press, Cody's son Ryder won the 2017 championship. Branch explains that saddle-bronc riding is "the classic, original rodeo event": It mimics the act of a cowboy trying to tame an unbroken horse. To do it well requires "balance and rhythm, brains and guts." Yes, brains: Cody Wright's success is partly the result of the detailed notes he keeps on every ride, notes that will give him an advantage the next time he draws that horse in a competition. Mostly, though, it's guts. The Wright brothers are constantly being hurtled from rearing broncs with names like Risky Business and Lunatic From Hell. Over the course of the book, shoulders are popped from their sockets. Arms and legs are broken. Rods and pins are inserted into bones. " I got a fair amount of metal in me," Cody tells Branch, with characteristic understatement. His legs are practically bionic. Branch, a reporter for The New York Times who first covered the Wrights for the newspaper, embedded with the family for more than three years - access nearly unheard of at a time when athletes prefer to tweet than talk to reporters. The book also has uncommon ambition: It's a story not just of rodeo, but of the contemporary West. Interspersed with chapters on bronc riding are ones devoted to Bill Wright, who runs a small cattle operation near Zion National Park. The Wright family has raised livestock in these parts for 150 years - Brigham Young officiated at the (second) marriage of the family patriarch. But with herds of cattle giving way to herds of mountain bikers, the cowboy way of life may finally be drawing to a close. Besides, there's more money in rodeo, if you're as good as the Wrights are. To his credit, Branch avoids the sentimentalism that can seep into such a tale. He also does an impressive job of making the rodeo life come off the page. The art of bronc riding can be mystifying, especially for those of us who haven't earned our spurs. Old hands see in a well-executed ride an eight-second epic of horsemanship, but it can be difficult to capture what separates a middling showing from a transcendent one - especially when the best riders make it look easy and carry themselves with a cowboy's stoicism. "Cody never said much," Branch writes. "He always thought he could learn a lot more by listening than by talking." It's a maxim the best reporters live by as well. There must have been some serious stretches of silence between author and subject on the long Western roads between rodeos. Reticence suits the Wrights. For black athletes, there has always been an imperative to speak out. As Howard Bryant, a senior writer for ESPN the Magazine, writes in THE HERITAGE: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (Beacon, $26.95), black ballplayers were among the first Americans of color allowed to attend white universities and to move into white neighborhoods. With those advances came a heavy burden: to advocate "for the people who had not made it, for whom the road was still blocked." "The Heritage" is the informal name for that responsibility, one that carries considerable risk. Those who mix athletics and politics are often told to shut up and play. Bryant charts the history of the Heritage, from its origins in the activism of Paul Robeson, who had been a football star at Rutgers, through the late-20th-century stretch when many black athletes rejected its demands. (As O. J. Simpson infamously put it, declining any responsibility to advocate for his race: "I'm not black. I'm O. J.") Lesser stars kept the tradition alive - players like Craig Hodges, the Chicago Bulls sharpshooter who, visiting the White House after the Bulls' 1992 title, presented President George H. W. Bush with a list of the black community's concerns. For his efforts, Hodges found himself a man without a team, as Colin Kaepernick does today. Bryant's account of this tradition is bracing. He's at his fiercest, however, when he arrives at the present and exposes the fundamental hypocrisy of the shut up and play directive. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States military has become a fixture of major-league sporting events, with flyovers, football-field-size flags, camouflage-uniform days. In an era of controversial wars in multiple countries, why, Bryant asks, should we view these loud displays as "patriotism" and Kaepernick's silent protest as unseemly politics? Kaepernick's detractors might ask themselves whether their real problem is the mixing of politics and sport, or the politics of the Heritage. In the version of baseball's integration trotted out each April 15 at ballparks around the major leagues, Branch Rickey signs Jackie Robinson and, with the stroke of a pen, the sport's shameful history of segregation is erased. The real story, of course, is far more complicated. "Integration was a process that involved hundreds of players on dozens of teams in tens of leagues across the country and over decades," writes Amy Essington, an instructor in history at Cal State Fullerton. Though many black players came to the majors having already played professionally in the Negro leagues, most began their careers in the minors. In the integration of THE PACIFIC COAST LEAGUE: Race and Baseball on the West Coast (University of Nebraska, paper, $19.95), Essington undertakes the first comprehensive account of black players joining the RC.L. In 1948, a catcher named John Ritchey became the league's first black player when he signed with the San Diego Padres affiliate. Unlike Robinson's, Ritchey's story has been all but erased from history. When Essington reached out to the president of the P.C.L.'s historical society, she learned its archival holdings had been inadvertently de-accessioned ("a move back East, the back of a truck opening on the highway"). Largely from secondary sources, including coverage in black newspapers, Essington pieces together the story of a talented ballplayer who was routinely derided by the opposition - one pitcher walked him on four straight brushbacks - and forced to room by himself while on the road. A former teammate recalls Ritchey's easy smile, but the trials of being a pioneer, particularly the unwelcoming treatment in his own dugout, wore on the catcher: "I never observed hostility, but I did observe a coolness, a distancing that was very apparent to Johnny. The smile on his face disappeared." This, too, is the story of integration. Laurent Dubois, a scholar of French colonialism at Duke, describes his new volume, the language of the GAME: How to Understand Soccer (Basic Books, $26), as a love letter to football. But that description doesn't quite get at its wonderfully odd approach. It's more like a commonplace book - a collection of wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of reading about his beloved sport. The book is divided into chapters dedicated to the various participants in a soccer match: the defender, the manager, the referee and so forth. Each chapter revisits legendary matches and sketches great players. (Zinedine Zidane, the French midfielder of Algerian descent, is naturally a favorite.) If your soccer fandom needs a tuneup before the World Cup, this book will more than suffice. But the real pleasure comes in Dubois's attempt to arrive at a kind of philosophical ideal for each position he describes. Consider the "eccentric art" of the goalie. That turn of phrase belongs to Vladimir Nabokov. The novelist, Dubois reminds us, played keeper at university and left behind his impressions of the position in "Speak, Memory." Nabokov noted the goalie's strange isolation from the game unfolding around him. He is "less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret." To illustrate the goalie's ethos of detachment, Dubois offers an anecdote from his trove. It's Christmas 1937, and the English teams Charlton Athletic and Chelsea are facing off. During the match, a dense fog descends over the pitch, leaving the Charlton keeper unable to see past half field. "While he stood there alone, he thought 'smugly' that his team must be giving Chelsea 'quite the hammer' at the other end of the field." Only when a policeman emerges from the fog and asks the young man why he is loitering on the field does the goalie realize the game was called owing to weather a quarter-hour earlier. Occasionally, the reader can struggle to keep up with Dubois's flights of fancy. Noting that Albert Camus was a goalie as well, Dubois posits, with seeming seriousness, that "one might even attribute the entire structure of his existentialist thought to this fact." From the keeper's inevitable failures - the certainty that an opponent will eventually beat you with a well-struck ball - Camus may have learned something about "the inevitability of death and the concomitant absurdity of life." Do we have goaltending to thank for "The Stranger"? Perhaps. Dubois allows that the Uruguayan novelist and soccer journalist Eduardo Galeano had a more prosaic explanation for Camus's affinity for the position: The impoverished young writer played goalie because "your shoes don't wear out as fast." JOHN SWANSBURG is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
Library Journal Review
Hernandez (coauthor, If at First) was a two-time World Series champion and a ten-time Gold Glove first baseman. In this memoir, he honestly explores his career from the minor leagues to the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1970s and the New York Mets in the 1980s. Hernandez does not shy away from his transgressions-including experimenting with drugs and alcohol as a young ballplayer-and honest opinions. He shares details of the trying relationship with his persistent father and the pressures of making it to the Major Leagues. His time as a TV broadcaster for the Mets provides perspective; how he sees the game now versus when he was a player. Today, Hernandez describes himself as a dinosaur who believes the game is too focused on home runs and strikeouts and not enough on the fundamentals. The book is not without faults, however; the prose is riddled with incoherent tangents. But anyone who has seen a Mets broadcast in recent years knows that this is exactly who Hernandez is. VERDICT Hernandez's unique analysis of the immense pressure to succeed in an unforgiving game will be well received.-Keith Klang, Port Washington P.L., NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.