I'm Keith Hernandez by Keith Hernandez

Author:Keith Hernandez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: baseball
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Citi Field

It’s three and a half hours before game time, but there’s already action in the Mets’ broadcast booth. Fox local news is taping a promotional interview for a Mets trivia contest that will air midseason. The cameras and lights are rolling while a reporter tries to stump the formidable team of Gary Cohen and Howie Rose, the Mets’ play-by-play announcers for TV and radio, respectively.

“What shampoo did Mike Piazza endorse?” the reporter asks.

Who gives a rat’s ass? I want to say. Ask something about baseball! But instead I say hello to our stage manager, Cari Loberfeld. Per usual, she greets me with an enthusiastic smile.

“How ya doin’, Keithy?” she whispers in her wonderful New York accent, handing me a coffee.

The booth, which is deep enough that you can be off-camera and carry on a quiet conversation, is the stage manager’s domain. They’re the eyes and ears for the producers out in the production truck and make sure we announcers have what we need for a successful broadcast: stat sheets, advertising copy, water, coffee, soda, popcorn, Cracker Jack, cookies, pretzels, Tootsie Pops, Kleenex, napkins, aspirin, eye drops, and, most important, a tidy work space so nobody trips on a sprint to the john between innings.

“Oh, traffic was a breeze,” I say.

“Wait till it warms up and everyone’s going back and forth to the beach,” says Richie Rahner, our A2 audio engineer. He’s our “fixer”—any audio or video issues, and he’s got it covered. Every December Richie sends me a Christmas card with pictures of his kids.

“The network promises to get me a helicopter,” I joke.

“You and me both,” says Cari, chuckling.

So how did I, a former ballplayer, get into this TV business in the first place? Well, I retired as a player after the 1990 season (sooner than I’d hoped), and I divorced myself from the game. I just needed to experience life without baseball for a while. I bounced around the city when I wasn’t traveling. I never even considered a new career, because there was nothing I wanted to do: I had no inclination for business, Wall Street was out of the question, and I didn’t want to sell real estate. Nothing motivated me. I was put on this earth to hit, catch, and field a baseball. That was my purpose in life, or at least I’d made it that. There was nothing else I wanted to do.

Then one night, about four or five years into my sabbatical from the game, I was sitting at a table at Elaine’s, a restaurant in New York City, opened in the 1960s, that attracted a lot of interesting people, especially actors and writers. I was hanging out there—like I always was back then—doing nothing, drinking lots of wine, and Elaine, the owner, who was the real reason anyone worth his salt went there, roamed into the restaurant. She came over and gave me a backhand on the shoulder and said, “What the f— are you doing with yourself? What are

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