Darling and Hernandez's journey from teammates to coworkers

One of the things we miss right now are the spring sounds of baseball, and that means the voices of baseball, too. It was right around this time a year ago that Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, as terrific a three-man broadcast booth as baseball has known, were getting ready to do their first March game for SNY, a way for their own new season to begin.

I was talking to Darling about that crew the other day, all the fun they have and the big fun they bring to their viewers. It means that a lot of the conversation was about Hernandez, and this irony:

That as much talking as they have done with each other since they first sat down in the SNY booth, they didn’t do much of that when they were on the field together, when they were both proud 86’ers with the Mets.

“He hardly ever came to the mound when I was pitching,” Darling said. “That was about me more than it was about him, and about my own aloofness. He was over there a lot with Dwight [Gooden] and with Sid [Fernandez] in particular. But once the game started, I wanted to be left alone, even between innings. I needed space. Again, that was just me. Just not Keith.”

Darling paused.

“I know this might sound crazy to fans,” he said. “But for all the baseball we played together, I really had no idea who Keith was until we started working together. And Keith would probably say he had no idea who I was until we started working together.”

Darling talked then about the teammate Hernandez, the great Met known as “Mex” had been, the leader of those flamboyant Mets teams of the middle 1980s, the player who changed everything with the Mets once he was traded to New York by the Cardinals during the 1983 season. His first full season with the Mets was ’84. It was the first full season for Darling, the kid from Yale. Two years later, they both won it all.

“I had never played with anyone like him,” Darling said. “And after I left the Mets, I never played with anybody like him ever again. Keith is simply an original, and an amazing personality. There was never anybody I knew who played with his kind of intensity, one who demanded one thing of himself and the rest of us: You better be ready at 7:05. That was Keith, living in that moment. The culture of our team was the culture of Keith.”

Hernandez’s No. 17 will be retired at Citi Field this summer. It is a fitting tribute to what he brought to only the second Mets team to win a World Series, and what he meant to that team. Now all this time later, Hernandez has re-introduced himself to a new generation of young Mets fans as a television personality. And Darling has said many times, always with a smile, that the Keith he works with in the booth is not the Keith with whom he played.

“The first time I met him was when I first came up in ’83,” Darling said. He laughed then. “I was pretty intimidated. I imagined him walking out of an old Sergio Leone western with that [Ennio] Morricone soundtrack in the background. But he is different now, more relaxed, not averse to chasing a few butterflies around.

“I think he’s just more comfortable with who he is, where he is in his life, what we’re all doing together. But underneath the frivolity, and everybody knows there’s a lot of that, when it comes to baseball, he still doesn’t suffer fools gladly. People who watch us know: He is still as disgusted as he ever was by bad baseball.”

Darling was talking then about the first game he and Cohen, a gifted play-by-play man and the one who keeps the car on the road, first did back in 2006, 20 years after he and Hernandez had won a World Series together.

“It was literally thirty seconds before we were about to go on the air,” Darling said. “But in that moment, in the booth, he was Capt. Keith again. He leaned over to me and said, ‘Listen, I do the hitting and you do the pitching.’ That was it. He took care of all of my concerns about the traffic in a three-man booth. You do your thing, I’ll do mine. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. If I ever go back to Yale to teach a broadcasting class, I’d start with that.”

It worked that night for Cohen, Darling and Hernandez. It will work again when they are all back in the booth together.

“There are no secrets when you spend that much time together,” Darling said. “Nothing is sacred. It’s all gonna come out.”

Darling and Hernandez didn’t do a lot of talking when they played together. Now they do, and Mets fans wait for the conversation to begin again.