When Frustration Meets Entertainment: Livan Hernandez’s Career In Black and Orange

           This article began as a “Top Five Giants I Weirdly Miss” list, but I realized I was essentially writing filler about the first four guys (who happened to be Jason Christiansen, Marquis Grissom, Kirk Reuter, and Felix Rodriguez) just to get to the guy I really wanted to talk about.  So I scrapped the list idea and decided just to focus on the big guy.  For me, Livan Hernandez is the baseball equivalent the annoying ex-girlfriend whose memory seems to get better and better over time.  As the nostalgia begins to cloud the brutal reality that was day-to-day coexistence, you begin to miss her.  You know you despised ever moment with her.  You know you cringed at every sound she made.  And you know you used to shutter when you even sensed her presence.  Yet, once she’s gone, there’s a palpable emptiness left in your life.  In a nutshell, this is how I feel about Livo.  

Skinny Livo Fat Livo

When the Giant’s first got him in ’99, there was understandable level of excitement.  He already shown that he was a serious inning eater (we would later discover that innings were merely the tip of the iceberg when it came to ‘ol Livo’s appetite) and had a World Series ring under his belt from the Marlins in ’97 (a postseason run where he won both the NLCS and World Series MVP).  On a side note, before the Giants had won their recent championships, I had a seething hatred towards everything about the Marlins.  It was like every year their executives looked at each other in Spring Training and said, What do ya think guys?  Should we win the World Series this year?  To which the response was either Fuck it. Why not?  or Nah...let’s just sell off all our players and tank like it’s going out of style.  Understandably, this apathetic, yet weirdly effective style of management became increasingly irritating to a devout fan of a team that hadn’t won a ring in half a century.  But the Giants have won two now *exhale* so I’m over it.  I’ll let the Indian’s fans fly that banner from now on.

The beginning of Hernandez’s inauspicious career with the Giants was actually quite promising:

year	W	L	ERA	IP	H	BB	SO	WHIP	WAR
2000	17	11	3.75	240.0	254	73	165	1.363	3.4

Pretty solid numbers for a Steroid Era pitcher.  It seemed as if the Giants had swindled the Marlins out of a star.  But no.  They didn’t.  It was all an elaborate Livo-hoax to piss off Giant’s fans even more once he tacked on, oh, let’s say, 50 extra pounds in 2001.  Here were the rest of his numbers as a Giant:

year	W	L	ERA	IP	H	BB	SO	WHIP	WAR
01-02	25	31	4.82	442.2	499	156	272	1.480	-0.3

          I’ll be honest, I was shocked when I realized that Hernandez only spent three and half seasons with the Giants.  It felt like an eternity.  And, surprisingly, these numbers were not as mindblowingly terrible as I expected them to be.  There was just something about the way that Livan Hernandez played the game of baseball that made him hands-down my least favorite player on the team.  And they were all reasons that couldn’t be captured on a box score.  It was his ridiculous pitch counts, routinely climbing into triple digits by the middle of the fourth inning.  It was dumb eephus pitches, floating over the plate at such embarrassingly slow speeds that the radar gun wouldn’t even register them.  It was lackadaisical windup, with his gut hanging over his front leg and his chins flapping in the wind.  I even resented how good of a hitter he was, as it gave off the impression that he was wasting his time practicing the wrong thing.  And, once he left for the Expos (who then became the Nationals) and suddenly became a two-time All Star, wow.  I hated him even more:

year	W	L	ERA	IP	H	BB	SO	WHIP	WAR
03-05	41	35	3.60	734.2	727	224	511	1.294	14.3

But now, looking back, I ironically miss him for all of the same reasons that used to drive me crazy.  For the hilarious pitch counts.  For the curveballs that wouldn’t break the speed limit in a residential neighborhood.  For the gut.  And the chins.  And even for his inexplicable ability to bring more value into the batter’s box than the pitcher’s mound.  The thing is, for all the frustration he caused me, he was responsible for an equal amount of entertainment.  And maybe it’s because frustration and entertainment seem to walk hand-in-hand with one another.  It’s a conversation starter.  Jesus Christ, did Livo eat Kirk Reuter?  It’s a running joke.  Has Livo ever had a one-two-three inning?  It’s a common plight you can commiserate with a fellow fan about. Good god, how did we end up with the defective Hernandez brother?  It’s like why my parents watch The Bachelorette simply to complain about how annoying all of the contestants are.  And, from 2000 to 2002, watching Livan Hernandez pitch was my Bachelorette, and he was the only contestant, and he only got more and more annoying.  And I miss him dearly.