The chance of being killed by a tornado is supposedly one in sixty thousand. According to the Bleacher Report, the chance of making it to the major leagues as a twentieth-round-or-later draft pick is less than 7 percent. So it was something like four thousand times more likely that I would make it to the major leagues than be sucked up by a giant funnel cloud. Wonderful!
Those odds were improving, too, because two months after the exhibition game with the Cardinals, I was leading the American Association in hitting, batting .351 with 63 RBI in 353 at-bats, and helping the Oilers to extend their first-place margin. I was so hot at the plate—and, more important, confident—that I even flew my dad out to Denver to meet the team for a weekend series against the Denver Bears.
It was a rare occasion that my father got to see me play since I’d turned pro, and much of that was purposeful. In fact, Bob Kennedy Sr. later told me that he had sent me to single-A ball in Florida rather than the California State League for my rookie year because he had wanted me to establish some distance from Dad and gain a little independence.1
My dad had brought me into baseball, holding my hand as a little boy and introducing me not only to the game’s fundamentals but also to its beauty. He did that for all the kids in the neighborhood. To this day, my brother and I can’t go anywhere around Pacifica without running into someone who remembers the countless “World Series” games Dad would host on the neighborhood diamond.
There would be two teams, and Dad would pitch. He showed us how to play the game, including its finer points, like how to turn two, baserunning, relays, rundowns, etc. We were all just seven, eight, nine, or ten years old, but we knew who the cutoff man was on a ball hit to left center with a play at the plate (the shortstop and first baseman), and we knew to hit that cutoff man to his glove side on a line. Dad taught us everything, and there wasn’t a single kid or parent involved with those teams who wasn’t grateful. He was all about the kids and teaching them the game he loved.
But Dad had a tough time letting go, and as I got older, his grip went from holding my hand to a suffocating chokehold. And it wasn’t just with baseball: Dad could be heard screaming at me over the cheers in the gymnasium during basketball, or from the stands well behind the sidelines during a football game. And every night I came home from practice or a game, there was the serious threat of a chewing-out session.
It had started when I was in the sixth grade, playing basketball. At first, Dad was great. When he discovered that his boys were interested in the sport, he called up his brother Uncle Ralph, who worked in construction, and the two of them built a concrete half-court in the backyard with a top-of-the-line backboard and rim. Dad knew nothing about the game, so he went out and got books and began to instruct us in the proper fundamentals, like how to shoot a jump shot: elbow bent at ninety degrees and tucked into the body, moving up toward the basket, the wrist snaps over for the finish, and the ball rolls off the fingertips.2 Dad would rebound the shots and feed us bounce passes as we made our way around the perimeter, baseline to baseline, working farther and farther away from the hoop, but not so far that we were dropping down to shoot from the hip. We’d run drills until the sun went down—Gary and I couldn’t get enough.
But when I began playing pickup games with Gary and the older kids in the school yard, Dad began hovering. I’d see his blue Mustang creeping up the street, and he’d go past us, make a U-turn, come back around, and park along the school-yard fence. Same grand entrance every day he wasn’t at the firehouse, which meant two days out of three. And he would stay there all day and watch us play. All damn day. When the games finished, Dad would finally leave, and I’d walk home with the basketball, dribbling with my non-dominant hand, eyes up—just like it said to do in Dad’s copy of Oscar Robertson’s book. Bong…bong…bong…Down Adobe Road to Linda Mar Boulevard, left on Hermosa Avenue, and the final 150 yards to the bottom of the cul-de-sac. I could do that walk in my sleep. Then I’d sneak around the side of the house into the backyard and up to the kitchen window. I’d peer in and see Mom at the kitchen sink, and I’d tap on the glass. Mom knew exactly what I was asking—Is Dad mad?—and she’d either smile or roll her eyes, like, Well, you know your father.
When I got to high school and Dad stepped up his surveillance with football and baseball practice—“Here comes Hernandez’s old man in that Mustang again”—I’d get home and wouldn’t want to go inside the house. I’d just sit out front for around five minutes, collecting myself, and then I’d open that door and there he’d be. Waiting for me by the foyer steps.
“You’re not hustling out there, Keith!” he’d start in. I never understood Dad’s definition of “hustle” because I was always busting my ass. To this day, it’s one of the great mysteries—I wish he’d lived longer so I could find out what the hell he meant. But the man would be in my face, often screaming that I didn’t do this and I didn’t do that.
The worst part was that it wasn’t 100 percent of the time. Otherwise I would have eventually tuned him out the way a soldier might tune out a drill sergeant who had only one volume. But Dad kept me on the line because sometimes I’d come home, take a deep breath, and he’d have a big grin, maybe give me a hug, and tell me how great I played that day. With Dad, you just flipped a coin.
I remember the final basketball game of my high school career. We were playing undefeated Hillsdale, and I needed 24 points to break the school’s all-time scoring record, which everyone knew going in. After we blew them out the first half, they came into the second half with a full-court press and tried to slow us down. As the point guard, I destroyed the press—dribbling, passing, running the floor like a field commander in a crack brigade—and we handily won the game. I scored only 14 points and missed the school record, but so what?
We just beat the conference champs!
After celebrating with my teammates at the local pizza place, I came home and walked into the living room expecting cheers. Instead, Dad started berating me for not shooting the ball more and breaking the record. I was so embarrassed and humiliated because Aunt Florence and Dad’s oldest brother, Uncle Henry, were there. I began crying, and all the good feelings that I’d had coming through the door from the game rushed out of my body. I mean here’s Dad with all his talk about team play, the stuff he’d drilled into us when we were kids, but now he could give two shits that we’d won the game. All he cared about was his son breaking a meaningless record. Well, by then I was seventeen, and it wasn’t the first time I had thought Dad actually wasn’t so different from his own father, Pa, who he said could not have cared less about Dad’s dedication to something larger than himself. All Pa had cared about was that his son was doing well by the family name because he was a star in some sport that all the others in the crowd seemed to admire. Well, Dad showed the same fault. The same stupid Spanish pride. Because it wasn’t about the team. It wasn’t even about me. It was about Dad and that he had raised a son who was a star.
And when he missed the chance to bask in that glory, he was unable to control himself.
At least Gary, God bless him, was there and told Dad off. “You don’t know what a great game your son just played,” Gary said after I’d gone to my room. “You don’t know anything about basketball. Keith played an unbelievable game.” But Dad couldn’t see it that way.
Yet it was because of Dad and all his instruction and passion for baseball that I was now a professional baseball player and, in large part, doing so well in the minor leagues. I was implementing all the things he had taught me over the years. Ever since those early BP sessions in front of the garage door, whenever Dad pitched the ball, he told Gary and me where the ball was in relationship to the strike zone: a couple of inches outside, low and inside, just missed down and in, about an inch down.
As a result, I knew the strike zone like the back of my hand, and later, in my major league career, most umpires would give me the benefit of the doubt on a close pitch. So while I may have been the one stepping up to the plate, it’s my father’s tutelage that got me there.
And heading to Denver for a weekend series in the middle of an incredible 1974 season in which I felt I’d turned the corner as a professional, I wanted Dad to see it. So I flew him in and had an awesome series, displaying my wares to my mentor, who was pleased and full of praise and pride.
I’d done good.
1 Probably what had happened was the Bay Area “bird dog” who had scouted me all that summer—a wonderful man named Jim Johnston—became aware of my father’s controlling nature and, despite his high regard for my dad, passed the information along to Kennedy and the powers above. Gary, on the other hand, played for the Modesto outfit, and Dad headed out to watch a lot of his games. But as a college graduate, Gary was older and more mature, so Kennedy was probably less concerned about Dad’s influence.
2 His go-to was Bill Sharman’s Sharman on Basketball Shooting. Dad didn’t mess around.