Pat Rice won’t forget the first time he saw Felix Hernandez.
“He was a quiet teenage kid, but you could tell he knew he was good,” said Rice, the Seattle Mariners’ minor league pitching coordinator.
Rice and Benny Looper, the Mariners’ player development director, had gone to Venezuela four years ago to judge for themselves if the teenage pitching prospect was truly as good as they’d been told.
In their jobs, they take a lot of these trips and often learn that the hype over a kid is more impressive than his pitches.
“He started out throwing just fastballs, and I remember thinking this kid had a really good arm. But he was missing up in the zone a little bit.
“Then we said, ‘Go ahead and throw some breaking balls.’ “
Hernandez dropped their jaws.
“Oh my gosh, that wasn’t just a high-school curveball,” Rice said. “It was filthy.”
Rice remembers thinking this kid had gotten some good coaching, and that he was one of those rare 18-year-old high-school seniors with the physical and mental capacity to get professional hitters out even then.
“Then they told me how old he was,” Rice said.
Hernandez was a 15-year-old high school freshman.
Rice thought again about that fastball, how it suddenly seemed more impressive coming from a kid much younger than he had thought.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh. This guy could be something good,’” he said. “Then, after he threw the curveball, he want back to his fastball. He was down in the zone, he was painting, throwing to both sides of the plate, throwing backdoor curveballs.
“All I could think was that this guy’s better than anybody we’ve got right now. And he’s only 15 years old. It was hard for us to fathom.”
The Mariners signed Hernandez that summer, beginning a fast track to the major leagues that, so far, has drawn more media attention than success in the big leagues.
He pitched summer ball in Venezuela that year, then came to the States and pitched his first pro season as a 17-year-old in 2003 with the Class A Everett AquaSox.
Two years later, on Aug. 4, 2005, he appeared in his first major league game with the Mariners. And despite just 60 days and 12 games as a major league pitcher last season, Hernandez did nothing to deflate the lofty projections that he’ll become a superstar.
This will be his first full major league season, and the Mariners will do everything they can to protect Hernandez from the physical and emotional pitfalls that the game can afflict, especially on someone so young.
The baseball world is dotted with onetime teenage prospects who never made it as big as forecast – David Clyde, Todd Van Poppel and the Mariners’ biggest flameout to date, Ryan Anderson.
They don’t want to mess up this opportunity, and the protection process involves Hernandez’s workload both on and off the field.
The Mariners want to limit him to 200 innings this year (including spring training) and they’ve closely monitored his growing media demands.
“We’re kind of in unexplored territory,” Rice said. “There’s going to be a balancing act between protecting him and letting him pitch.”
All the attention that Hernandez got four years ago when Rice and Looper first saw him has blossomed into a fascination by the media.
Almost from the moment the Mariners signed him on July 4, 2002, word filtered out about this pitching prodigy.
He’s never had a losing record in the minor leagues, and his 3.30 ERA at Class AA San Antonio was his worst as a pro. In the dozen games he pitched for the Mariners late last season, he went 4-4 with a 2.67 ERA.
With numbers like that, there was no escaping the spotlight.
Newspaper, magazine, radio and TV reporters descended on the Mariners at spring training this year, and it was clear Hernandez had become a hot story not only locally, but also nationally and internationally. They all came with questions aimed at revealing the secret to that strong right arm and the innermost thoughts of a 19-year-old superstar.
The attention excited everyone but Hernandez.
“I’m uncomfortable with it,” said Hernandez, who this spring sat through nearly a dozen photo shoots and reporter interviews, posing for many of the same shots and listening to the same questions.
“When I thought of playing baseball, I never thought of that. It was never important to me. I am a little tired of it and I’ve had enough.”
The Mariners knew going into spring training that it could get like this. Hernandez would be one of the big stories of camp, along with rookie Japanese catcher Kenji Johjima, and the Mariners did their best to keep his interview schedule manageable. They tried to stack most of the interviews early in spring training, before exhibition games began.
“We didn’t want to overwhelm him off the field,” said Tim Hevly, the Mariners’ director of baseball information. “Every camp, there’s generally somebody who’s the ‘it’ guy (among reporters seeking interviews). Everybody who comes in might have four different guys they want to talk with, but he was on all their lists.”
It was clear in the Mariners’ clubhouse that Hernandez was the focus.
Often, when a new reporter would walk into the clubhouse, a veteran player or two would chip, “You must be here for Felix. His locker is over there.”
The same happened with Ken Griffey Jr., who made his major league debut in 1989 at age 19 and, after teasing from teammates, began resisting the media.
“Felix has handled it all extremely well,” said Dan Rohn, the Mariners’ administrative coach who was Hernandez’s manager last year with the Class AAA Tacoma Rainiers.
“He’s kept his mouth shut, he’s taken the abuse from the veterans and he’s gone out done his job. It’s been an abnormal amount of focus on someone who’s a 19-year-old kid.”
Facing many of the same questions throughout spring training, Hernandez’s answers were neither deep nor different, especially in group interviews.
* How do you feel about being limited to 200 innings?
“It’s fine with me. I know they’re trying to protect my arm to make sure that I don’t get hurt. They’re the ones who know. I don’t really know, so I leave it up to them.”
* How far beyond expectations was last year, when you reached the major leagues?
“I was really proud of myself for getting there and doing well.”
* What are your goals for this season?
“Every year, my goal is to stay healthy.”
* What do you need to improve?
“Everything.”
* How much have the expectations affected you, and how do you deal with them?
“I really don’t put any pressure on myself. I just go out and do what I can and help the team the best I can.”
* How has your life changed in a year?
“Nothing has really changed. It’s just that people know me a little more.”
* When you’re not at the ballpark, what do you like to do?
“Nothing much. Just hang out with my friends.”
He is, after all, only 19.
Writers who’ve known Hernandez a few years have gotten him to reveal a little more about himself, but not a lot.
Hernandez grew up the son of a busy truck driver. Because of dad’s schedule,was mom took who took the boy to the field most of the time. Hernandez always threw hard, and he pitched a no-hitter when he was 8.
“I have a lot of good memories playing baseball,” he said. “I remember my yellow uniform with green lettering. We were the Yellow Flowers.”
When Hernandez’s father, Felix, did watch him pitch, he would make suggestions.
“Try this, try that,” Hernandez said of his dad. “He’d played baseball a lot, too.”
Rice said it was obvious from the first time he saw Hernandez that someone taught him the right way to pitch.
“Or it was God-given natural ability,” he said. “To be honest, we didn’t do much with his delivery when he came to us. We did some small things, but it’s pretty much what he had when we saw him. You don’t want to mess with something like that.”
The Mariners are doing everything possible to protect Hernandez, figuring if they don’t abuse him now they’ll have something special for a long time.
“Our main concern is keeping this kid healthy, at least from the preventable injuries,” manager Mike Hargrove said. “We’d rather have him pitching like this for 15 years instead of three.
“I’m sure there are going to be times when I take him out of the game and people will say, ‘What in the world is wrong with that idiot?’ And there will be times when I’ll feel the same way about myself, ‘What is wrong with me?’ But we’re going into this with the idea that we want this kid around a long time. It’s the smart thing to do, and everybody needs to get all their gripes out of the way early because it’s going to happen. We’re just asking people to understand.”
Hernandez has been relatively injury-free since the Mariners signed him. He missed some time last year with Tacoma because of bursitis in his right shoulder, and he developed shin splints at spring training last month that caused him to miss his final exhibition start.
Perhaps more than the physical peril Hernandez might face, the Mariners are wary of the mental strain the game can have on anyone, but especially someone who’s 19.
Hernandez has handled his early success well, but they’re curious how he will react to failure.
“He’s yet to have a bad streak when he went a number of bad games in a row,” Rice said. “Sooner or later, that’s going to happen. That’s when we need to make the right moves with him. He’s extremely mature for a kid his age and he can handle just about anything that cones his way.
“Physically, he’s going to tell us when he’s feeling good and when he’s feeling bad. But at some time or another, he’s going to have a series of failures and it could affect him mentally, and that’s when we need to protect him.”
The only times Hernandez has visibly been affected mentally occurred last year during the few instances he struggled with his control or was hit hard.
In spring training a year ago, he tended to lose focus and over-throw when he got into trouble.
Before he was shut down because of the shin splints, Hernandez had a good spring training this year. He went 1-1 with a 3.86 ERA, and dominated the Arizona Diamondbacks in his last start.
“There’s not one glaring weakness in his game,” Hargrove said. “He just needs experience and needs to improve his consistency. He’s got three, and four if you count his slider, above-average major league pitches.
“He needs experience, he needs to pitch.”
This is the season Hernandez will get the experience, and the Mariners will monitor him every pitch along the way.
“Pitching-wise, he’ll be fine. How he bounces back from failure and how he handles the fame are his two obstacles this year,” Rice said. “I came up with Griffey and I know how hard it was on him from the inside. Great players have to deal with it. Some deal with it better than others, and some it takes awhile.
“It’s going to happen. With this kid, I might be wrong.”
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