Because how frightening, really, is a World Series start when barely two years ago, the Cuban authorities who had control over his life and his livelihood told Hernandez he would never pitch again.
Not very -- frightening, that is -- Hernandez answered Sunday night. Making his first appearance on baseball's biggest stage, he scattered just six hits over seven innings as the Yankees beat the Padres 9-3 to take a 2-0 lead heading back to San Diego.
The night before his start, Hernandez admitted that one year ago, while still back in Cuba, he didn't know how he would get to the major leagues, only that he was sure he would.
``I didn't think I would be here today,'' he said. ``But yes, I did think of finding a way to one day be here.''
That journey is a story in itself, and if just half the rumors circulating around Yankee Stadium are true, it will be a movie coming to a theater near you soon enough.
Suffice it to say it will begin with a childhood spent scuffing around dusty baseball diamonds and follow a young man through the discovery of his precocious talent. Next comes a career so spectacular as the star pitcher of baseball's outlaw nation that his countrymen took to calling him ``El Duque.''
One day, though, he will decide his world is not wide enough and set out to escape from the vise grip in which his homeland holds him. There will be a long and dangerous journey on a raft with a handful of other defectors, a short and heady trip through the minor leagues and more money than he ever dreamed of.
In the climactic scene, El Duque will stare down from the mound of Yankee Stadium and smile to himself, wondering why everybody on every side of him is so nervous to have arrived at the same place. Even the wife who made the trip on the raft alongside him. Noris Bosch sat behind home plate Sunday night with a few friends and said little.
``I'm very nervous,'' Bosch said. ``But I'm very proud my husband is pitching the second game of the World Series.''
In a sense, Hernandez has already appeared in that scene a hundred times. A year ago, his younger half-brother, Florida Marlins pitcher Livan Hernandez, won the World Series as Orlando and their mother watched from the CNN studios in Havana. Livan told everyone who listened that back home was another Hernandez, just as tough and a better pitcher, to boot.
When reporters sought Orlando out, he was still under suspension because of thin -- very thin -- evidence that he, too, had considered defecting. Like his younger brother, Orlando, too, worried about reprisals against his mother and so his celebration was understandably muted.
``What I did feel was great pride,'' he said about Livan, ``because he is doing right now what I can't do.''
Orlando was not exaggerating. He won almost 150 games in baseball-mad Cuba and in almost every important international competition to which authorities let him travel. Orlando pitched in three World Championships, the Olympics and so many other big games, he conceded, ``I don't remember.''
But his manager, Joe Torre, had no problem remembering the most recent one. It came in Game 4 against Cleveland in the ALCS. The Yankees, still rattled by Chuck Knoblauch's incredible screw-up two games earlier, trailed the Indians two games to one. Hernandez went out and gave his team seven shutout innings in a 4-0 win that turned the momentum and the series around.
``In my mind,'' Torre said, ``he's not going to pitch in any more important game than that one.''
Not that El Duque appeared any more impressed than usual afterward.
``When you've gone through in the last 12 months what he's had to go through,'' Torre added, ``they're all just games to him.''
So, it seems now that Hernandez is so guarded with his answers. He is as careful and confounding in handling questions as he is with his pitches and the quirky delivery he uses to throw them. When he turned up in the interview room before Game 1 of the Series, a club official announced that questions about the escape from Cuba would be off-limits.
``I've been in press conferences where he's been asked and it's been difficult for him to talk about it, so I never ask,'' Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said.
Then he paused. ``But I'm glad he made it.''
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press