Solid as they come.

Screen: SNY/MLB

Keith Hernandez is a lot of things to a lot of different people. He hits all of the quadrants, to use a showbiz term. Some nights he comes off as bookish, boorish, an Everyman, and Definitely Much Better Than You in a span of an inning. It doesn’t mean he is perfect, not by any stretch from even the laziest of first basemen. He can’t see the future, for one thing. He didn’t spot the second coming of Keith Hernandez when he first locked eyes on Michael Conforto, the only contemporary baseball player he wrote about for more than a sentence in his new memoir I’m Keith Hernandez. The lone player he wrote is “becoming a star.”

He did not pretend to see the future because he was not Theo Epstein, nor was he Sandy Alderson. Epstein and Alderson were paid to be futurists, to turn the Cubs and Mets respectively into perennial World Series participants through endless years of purposeful suckitude followed by seasons of rosy mediocrity. It was the last of the Almost Respectable seasons for both franchises on the night of the 2014 Major League Baseball Draft. It also happened to be the evening when the two teams played against each other at Wrigley Field. Perennial MVP Kris Bryant was in Double-A at the time. The left fielder wearing a Mets uniform with the numbers 3 and 0 on the back of it was Andrew Brown, a man who might be very nice in real life but you would only say was “immortal” to win a sarcasm contest. The Cubs selected Kyle Schwarber with the fourth overall selection that night. The Mets took a 21 year old with thunder in his bat and lightning quick synapses six spots later. His name is Michael Conforto. His nickname would turn out to be “Scooter”. We take him for granted. His existence makes us feel better about ourselves. He gives us the confidence to say pretentious bullshit like “thunder in his bat and lightning fast brain synapses,” for better or worse.

SNY rolled Conforto’s college highlight reel to the Mets fans watching at home and to Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez in the broadcast booth. Hernandez witnessed the kid fervently high fiving a teammate with his heavily protected forearm after a home run.

“Okay…I guess they do that in college too.” Keith’s disapproval was in a voice slightly above a whisper, as if he did not want to wake up the older people who would only also disapprove of youths showing positive emotion.

He then watched the young man — who later became the fastest player to debut as a Met and hit 50 home runs — club a couple of dingers. “There’s his swing,” Cohen noted.

“Yup, there you go.” Hernandez said this with the enthusiasm of a pallbearer, or in baseball terms, with the enthusiasm of a man who had seen plenty of impressive feats of strength from dudes who peaked as athletes and as men at an institution of higher learning. Besides, Conforto looked like he was trying to hit those home runs. It was not the way Keith was taught how to hit a baseball.

Conforto’s agent Scott Boras knew otherwise. Maybe. Boras and Keith’s brother Gary were roommates in 1975, both members of the Single-A St. Petersburg Cardinals. Keith has said on record that his former agent Boras is a “dear friend”. Has been for over four decades now. Keith has not said publicly that he is no fool and knows Boras is a professional bullshitter, but you would have to think this is definitely the case. While Boras jumped the shark awhile ago with his metaphors that are so terrible they have single-handedly made similes cool again, he occasionally does happen to hit upon the unequivocal truth. This is what happened when he tried to send a message to Keith, by way of Gary Cohen on the Mets broadcast the July night Michael Conforto signed his contract and got a tour of Citi Field. “Scott told me to tell you that Michael Conforto has Keith Hernandez-like barrel control with his bat, ‘and I don’t say that very often,’” Cohen related. Boras of course had said that before. Earlier that day. To Keith, as Keith admitted moments later.

Keith played nice. He also was not born yesterday. He was not falling for Conforto because of his interview with Steve Gelbs either. “I’m a very aggressive hitter, but I like to be aggressive in a smart way.”

That sounds wonderful, but we’d all like to think we are Golden Gods...

Conforto adorably apologized to Gelbs at one point, admitting he was not listening to him because he was caught up in the game transpiring below.

How cute. I bet New York will eat him alive…

What Keith didn’t know, and what Scott Boras might not have even known, is how Conforto really was destined for Keith to gush over. It wasn’t just that both Keith and Michael quarterbacked their high school football teams or anything mundane like that. There were two key similarities Keith locked into to.

The first: Hernandez hit third in the batting order over 75 percent of the time during his career, and in 100 percent of his starts in 1986. Hitting third was a badge of honor for Keith. Michael Conforto was a star on the Redmond North team that played in the 2004 Little League World Series, the only 11 year old on a squad full of 12 year old squirts. His coach hit him third. Why exactly?

We had him third in the lineup, where you put the best hitter.

The second: The Brooklyn Dodgers signed Keith Hernandez’s father John in 1940. He was a first baseman (right-handed). He might have made the majors had he not gotten beaned one night on a field with poor lighting. He became a firefighter instead, spending most of his leisure hours training his sons Keith and Gary to become what he did not. John gave Keith and Gary written exams about baseball beginning when Keith was eight years old. Keith was taught by John to focus on line drives and to strive for a .300 or above batting average. Gap-to-gap hitting. The home runs will come. Hernandez would find detractors of this hitting approach for the first seven years of his career, including after he achieved success and fame. To this day he remembers being dismissively referred to in a newspaper as a “slap hitter” after winning the 1979 MVP award with the power hitting Willie Stargell. In his book he recalled attending an awards dinner in Kansas City and overhearing George Brett mock him.

When I was being honored as the MVP, they played a highlight reel of my season. Brett was sitting behind me, about fifteen, twenty feet away, and at one point the video showed me hit an up-and-in fastball that I had to inside-out, and I hit a freaking bullet down the left-field line. A great piece of two-strike hitting. Brett started giggling: “Inside-out Judy hitter.” And that pissed me off.

This makes Keith’s disdain of the term “launch angle” on TV and on Twitter incredibly on #brand, not to mention the David Cone thing* all the more juicy and complicated.

*Keith has referred to David Cone as “George” for over 30 years now, rarely explaining the backstory: When Cone joined the Mets from the Royals organization in 1987, he would not shut up about his idol: George Brett. Keith never mentioned the part about Brett pissing him off and dismissing him as a “Judy Hitter” though, and he certainly never brought up on SNY that Ted Williams replaced “Judy” with “pussy” while pop quizzing Keith on hitting. To this day Keith only refers to Cone as “George”, confusing most casual viewers.

Anyway, here’s the key passage:

But I got the feeling from some of the big hitters in baseball that they didn’t respect my game. Particularly those in the American League who just saw my stat lines, and because I hadn’t hit a lot of home runs, they assumed I was just some inside-out hitter, when in fact I hit more line drives — gap to gap — than perhaps anyone else in the game. I just didn’t try to lift the ball — I was trained to hit the top half of the ball, not the bottom half (and good thing, playing in Busch Stadium, the second biggest park in the league.)

Michael Conforto was taught gap-to-gap hitting at Oregon State. Didn’t just give lip service to this hitting philosophy either, as it turned out. He struggled for six weeks his sophomore year because he was trying to pull everything. “When Michael hits best is when he’s using from right-center to left-center,” his assistant coach said. Michael remembered this, through at least the start of his Mets career.