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I hate the New York Mets; as a native Atlantan, this virulence was bred into me. Yet I must also admit that, as a 14-year resident of New York City, I often find myself settling down and tuning into SNY on summer nights to watch the Mets broadcasts—not for the team, but for analyst Keith Hernandez.

As a player, Hernandez was named National League co-MVP in 1979, and won two World Series titles (one with the Cardinals in ’82, one with the Mets in ’86). He was just as dynamic off the field, a man about Manhattan, making a GQ cover appearance as well turning in a brilliant cameo on Seinfeld.

These days, as a Mets announcer alongside Gary Cohen and Ron Darling, Hernandez breezily mis humor and baseball expertise, chatting amiably about everything from pitch counts to weekends in the Hamptons. You don’t have to like the Mets, but Hernandez makes the Mets’ broadcasts nearly irresistible.

GQ: You have a knack for telling stories and analyzing the game. Did broadcasting come easy for you?

** **Keith Hernandez: The stories are just things that go on and have gone on in my life in the past, my life and baseball and other things—those are all just memory and relaying the story. There’s games that you have to entertain: not every game is a 1-0 game or 2-1 game; there’s a lot of games that are, like, 8-0, and those are the games you have to work at it and try to hold the viewer, so you get into storytelling. Gary Cohen, SNY broadcaster really orchestrates as the game goes on, and gets us telling stories and gets us back on the game if it gets to be too much. He’s the real professional. He went to school and did all the minor league stuff to become a play-by-play guy. As the analyst, I just talk about what I see and give my opinions as the game progresses. And I know the game, so it’s easy for me.

I was watching a game one night and you told a great story about when you were playing minor league ball in Tulsa and a tornado came through town.

** **The storms always go to the northeast, evidently, from the southwest to the northeast. So it had hit Oklahoma City in the morning, and Tulsa was northeast, two hours, so it was coming. We got phone calls in the morning that the game was canceled, and I was at an apartment complex with a lot of young people, and we just played volleyball in the pool all day. It was extremely hot and humid. Then around 4 o’clock, the front came, a pea green cloud—you could’ve cut a line on the cloud with a scalpel. And it was over our heads before you knew it and everybody was scrambling. I wound up going into a ditch just off the parking lot. Within five minutes I was waist-deep in water, and the trees were swaying, and I thought, Oh my God, if a tree falls I’m going to drown. So I climbed out and went back into my apartment, blah blah blah, and the next day I had poison oak from head to toe. That ditch was full of poison oak. We had to bus to Omaha to play the Omaha Royals the next day, and I was head-to-toe poison oak the whole bus ride. The doctor gave me cortisone shots when I got into Omaha, and it was 105 degrees. And I played the game, with all that poison oak everywhere. That’s the story. I don’t ever want to be a part of a tornado ever again.