Tomato Nation

I like Keith Hernandez, but as a TV commentator, he has weaknesses. Leaving aside the "what's that betty doing in the dugout" incident, Hernandez tends to dwell more than I'd like on the kind of analysis Bill James calls "Old Ballplayers Never Die" — the "in my day, we used to play offense and defense uphill, both ways, in the snow, and we fought off bad hops with a loose-leaf notebook" remarks bemoaning various changes in the game.

When he's in the booth with Gary and Ron, I don't notice it as much, or it reads as an almost Catskills-humorous contrast to the better researched, less self-serious comments of the other two — and compared with the customary idiocies of Michael Kay et al. in the Yankee booth, it's practically a cold drink — but an entire book's worth is too much, and as a result, Shea Good-Bye is a disappointment. Hernandez is smarter than most ex-players and has always chosen good co-writers, and in his defense (I guess), the portentous tone is not new; he strays into I, Pompous Veteran territory any number of times in If At First as well.

It's just not leavened here, and I might not really have noticed it if Hernandez and Matthew Silverman had provided more behind-the-scenes information or a more in-depth investigation of the 2008 season. The book bills itself right on the back cover as "a behind-the-scenes look at the Mets' final season at Shea," and as individual-team seasons go, that one provided no shortage of drama on and off the field, but Hernandez doesn't tell us anything we don't know about, say, what led to Randolph's ouster, or the decision to keep Ryan Church off the DL. Hernandez is typically unenlightening about the dust-up between himself and Jose Reyes, after an on-field Reyes mini-tantrum lit the fuse on a typical Hernandez rant about manners and class in baseball today:

I won't go into specifics of my conversation with Jose on the plane after the game. He was upset; I was not. He said his piece; I said my piece. … Based on the comments Jose gave to the media, he still seems to think that I criticized him about the error. If that is really what he thinks, he doesn't get it and he never will. (127)

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