On Astros History: Carlos Hernandez Is Brilliant And Then Gone

Remembering a phenom who embodied that word, burned brightly and faded out far too soon

In 2001, the Astros starting rotation looked radically different than it had during their last trip to the playoffs.

Instead of inner circle Astros Jose Lima and Shane Reynolds, instead of Rob Lowe lookalike Mike Hampton, the Astros had a bunch of kids.

Okay, well, that’s not entirely true. Reynolds made 33 starts that year. Lima made nine.

But, a sea change was coming.

Not even the youngest holdover on the staff, Scott ‘El Train’ Elarton was safe. Having broken onto the scene in 1998, Elarton grabbed a rotation spot in ‘99.

What changed? Well, Enron Field hit the 90’s staff like a ton of bricks. It’s hard to remember now, because Minute Maid Park plays fairly even, with a ballpark factor of 102 for batters.

But back then? Enron Field was a band box. It was a blasting range where Sammy Sosa could hit a ball into the dang light tower above the train tracks, where the ball was still going up when it hit.

The transition from a pitcher friendly Astrodome to Enron destroyed Lima’s career. It blasted poor Scott Elarton to Colorado. It ballooned Reynolds’ usually steady ERA.

And it opened the door for new blood.

Prospects Rise To The Top

The 2000 season saw Wade Miller establish himself as a major league starter. A year later, the Wizard of Os magicked his way into the rotation for the next 10 years, along with fellow hotshot prospect Tim Redding* and our subject today, Carlos Hernandez.

*A year after that? Future Dirtbags and Horned Frogs head coach Kirk Saarloos and future lights out closer Brad Lidge popped on the scene. Neither impacted the rotation, but it felt worth mentioning.

Hernandez was signed out of Venezuela, during a very fruitful run of Astros prospects signed out of that country. He joined Johan Santana, Melvin Mora, Richard Hidalgo, Bobby Abreu, Freddy Garcia, Carlos Guillen, and Wilfredo Rodriguez in signing out of Tierra de Gracia.

Hernandez as a prospect

Signed by Houston in 1996 by legendary international scout Andres Reiner, Hernandez began his professional career in 1997 in Venezuela.

He pitched for one of Houston’s Dominican Summer League teams in 1998, posting eight saves in relief. He was promoted to rookie league Martinsville for the ‘99 season, where he made 13 appearances, including 9 starts.

Over that stretch, he threw 55 1/3 innings with a 1.79 ERA and 82 strikeouts. As a 19-year-old. I feel like a performance like this, where a teenager has a 13 K/9 rate would cause an Astros prospect twitter meltdown.

Hernandez got noticed. And promoted again, this time to the Michigan Battle Cats (one of the coolest minor league nicknames of the 90s). Over 22 starts, he threw 110 2/3 innings with 115 strikeouts. His walk rate also ballooned up over 5.1 per nine innings.

But, it was impressive enough to get him invited to the 2000 Futures Game during the All-Star Break in Atlanta.

A quick digression on that Futures Game (or a chance to Remember Some Guys)

Because damn, that was a loaded lineup for both sides.

In only the second year of the event, the USA roster included Houston’s own and World Series winner Josh Beckett, future Hall of Famer C.C. Sabathia, borderline Hall of Famer Mark Buehrle, perennial All-Stars Ben Sheets, and Barry Zito.

The rest of the USA roster included future All-Star catcher Brandon Inge, future All-Star second baseman Marcus Giles (the brother of Pirates legend Brian Giles), future AL MVP Josh Hamilton, Toronto Blue Jays legend Vernon Wells, future Astro Eric Munson, future Cowboys quarterback Drew Henson, and serviceable players Brad Wilkerson, Jack Cust, Corey Patterson, and Sean Burroughs.

They nailed that Futures roster is what I’m saying.

The International roster also had a few gems, including future All-Stars Danys Baez and Felipe Lopez, stalwart catchers Ramon Castro and Miguel Olivo, future Astros Wilfredo Rodriguez and Carlos Pena, and serviceable arms like Tomo Ohka, Aaron Myette, Ramon Ortiz, and Carlos Silva. I could have listed Pena as future All-Star, or as star of the book and movie Moneyball, but I like to remember him for those 85 games he played in 2013 as Houston’s inaugural designated hitter.

Back to Hernandez

The 2000 season put him on the map, even as a 20-year old playing in A ball. It was enough for him to get a writeup in the 2001 Baseball Prospectus.

Like Wilfredo Rodriguez, Carlos Hernandez is a left-hander out of Venezuela and a sign that the pipeline that started with Bobby Abreu hasn’t dried up yet. Hernandez did not develop major-league velocity until recently, which gives him an advantage in that he’s already learned to hit his spots. He's still several years away, and that still may not be enough time for the Astros to figure out what to do with the 15 pitchers ahead of him.

Indeed, the 2001 season saw Hernandez playing for Double-A Round Rock with Redding and Lidge and the boys. Hernandez went 12-3 with a 3.69 ERA in 139 innings for Round Rock with 167 strikeouts.

He also got tabbed for a second Futures Game. I won’t dive into the roster again, but I will say it featured future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera, Houston’s own Adam Dunn, and future Astros Cody Ransom, Brett Myers, Jerome Williams, Jose Valverde, and Erik Bedard.

That B-Pro writeup says Hernandez was several years away from the majors. It turned out, he was merely months from breaking through.

The debut

Shane Reynolds got scratched from his start Aug. 18 due to back tightness. In his place, Houston rolled out Hernandez against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

While most time in recent history, that meant bad things, these Pirates weren’t that bad. This lineup featured good hitters like Aramis Ramirez, the aforementioned Brian Giles, Jason Kendall (playing right field), and even a hard-hitting rookie in Craig Wilson.

All Hernandez did was sit them down. In seven masterful innings, Hernandez struck out seven Pirates and allowed two hits and two runs. He needed just 102 pitches to fly through the order.

Octavio Dotel shut it down the rest of the way with two perfect innings.

It was the first time an Astros pitcher had debuted with at least 5 innings of shutout baseball in the 39-year history of the franchise.

A wild series of notes

When he made his debut on Aug. 18, he did more than shut out the Pirates.

He learned of his start approximately an hour-and-a-half before game time.

He combined for the second-ever shutout at Minute Maid Park.

He became the first lefthander to start for the Astros since Mike Hampton on Oct. 3, 1999 vs. Los Angeles in the final regular season game in the Astrodome.

That last one deserves more background. Houston entered the game with the longest streak in the Majors without starting a lefty (284 games). The 2000 season was the first in franchise history without a game started by a lefthander.

Houston didn’t have a bevy of lefty arms before this point, but Mike Hampton was a mainstay, overlapping with lefty free agent boondoggle Greg Swindell. Before that it was a year of Butch Henry and then beloved former broadcaster and noted wit Jim Deshaies. J.D. and Bob Knepper held down the left side together for the back half of the 80’s too.

So, for a brief moment in 2001, it looked like Hernandez would be next in that solid lefty starter line.

Instead, it went from Hernandez to Jeriome Robertson and Ron Villone in 2003 to Andy Pettite to Wandy Rodriguez to Dallas Keuchel to Wade Miley to Framber Valdez.

The Aftermath

So what happened with Hernandez? Why did such a promising arm suddenly flame out?

In the saddest of baseball injuries, it was a freak accident. Hernandez was running the bases and injured his shoulder sliding into second base.

Hernandez made two more starts in 2001. He pitched well over six shutout innings of work on Aug. 23 against the Philadelphia Phillies, striking out seven while allowing five hits and two walks. The Astros went on to win that game 2-1 in 11 innings.

In the next game, Aug. 29 against the Cincinnati Reds, Hernandez got his first major league hit, a single off Reds starter Elmer Dessens.

Craig Biggio moved him to second with a line drive single to center field before Julio Lugo lined into a double play. Reds third baseman Dmitri Young caught the liner and quickly threw to second, which caused Hernandez to dive back to safety. In that dive, he hurt his shoulder.

Hernandez didn’t immediately leave the game. He gutted out another 1 2/3 innings of work, finishing with 4 2/3 innings pitched, allowing two earned runs, four hits, four walks, and three strikeouts. Those were the first runs Hernandez allowed in his major league career, and the first time he failed to go at least 5 innings in a start.

Both runs came on an Adam Dunn homer in the bottom of the fifth, after Hernandez hurt his shoulder.

After the game, it was revealed Hernandez had partially torn his rotator cuff on the slide back into second. He would miss the rest of the 2001 season.

Hopes for 2002

Despite the injury, plenty of people were high on Hernandez. He was finally getting noticed as a prospect. His filthy curveball led the way, but he gained enough velocity to throw his fastball in the low 90s, which helped him advance through the minors.

Before the 2002 season, Baseball Prospectus wrote about him again.

Generally ranked behind Wilfredo Rodriguez before this year, Hernandez is a short Venezuelan left-hander. Although his outstanding curve gets the most press, he throws in the low 90s and has a good change-up, so we’re not talking about Doug Johns. Brought up in mid-August, he might have been the Astros’ savior down the stretch, but he had to sit out the rest of the year after injuring his shoulder diving into second base. In part because it wasn’t a pitching injury, he hasn’t had surgery, instead spending the winter rehabbing. Considering his age and his history of nagging arm problems, there’s a lot to worry about here. He might be good for a few weeks or months, but he will break down.

I find prophetic words like this really sad. It’s always a bummer when someone is right about a bad thing, like a career breaking down. I’m not sure BPro knew he would break down so dramatically, but they nailed it all.

It’s a curious thing why he didn’t have surgery to repair a rotator cuff tear just because it wasn’t a pitching injury. Even still, a course of rehab isn’t unusual for this type of injury.

It just didn’t work out for Hernandez.

He came back in 2002 with a spot in the rotation. He pitched well enough, but didn’t see the brilliance he had flashed in those first two games of 2001.

Hernandez went 7-5 with a 4.38 ERA over 111 innings in his first full season in the majors. That included 21 starts, 93 strikeouts, and 61 walks. The control issues he battled in the minors came back, but he wasn’t missing as many bats, failing to strike out at least 9 batters per nine innings for the first time in his pro career.

More ominously, he did not pitch past Sept. 12, as the Astros finally shut him down after an MRI revealed an impingment in his left shoulder and rotator cuff tendinitis. The plan was to again rehab his arm aggressively.

However, that didn’t work. More tests over the winter revealed a small tear oof the labrum and another tear in the rotator cuff on his left shoulder. Hernandez underwent surgery to fix these issues on Feb. 4, 2003, missing the 2003 season.

A Brief Return

Hernandez made nine starts in 2004 after recovering from his surgery. He began the season at Triple-A New Orleans, starting 23 games there. His overall stats looked decent. He had a 3.60 ERA and went 9-4 in 127 2/3 innings, but his peripherals were all down. He struck out just 81 batters and gave up 115 hits.

Still, he was promising enough that Houston called him up on Aug. 14. The Astros were in the midst of losing Andy Pettitte for the season with an elbow injury.

Houston had tried to salvage Darren Oliver after a bumpy start of the season with the Florida Marlins. They signed him in July and gave him three starts. He left the third after just one inning of work with shoulder tightness. Oliver wouldn’t pitch the rest of the season.

Hernandez was successful-ish at first. He took a hard-luck loss in his first start, picking up a quality start by throwing six innings and allowing 7 hits and three runs while striking out six. He also threw an amazing 111 pitches. For a guy with a bum shoulder, maybe that wasn’t the smartest idea.

He got shelled in his next start in Philadelphia, giving up six runs in four innings and striking out only one.

His third start was his best of this short season, throwing seven innings of two-run ball with six strikeouts against the same Philly lineup that blasted him the time before.

He wouldn’t pitch in the seventh inning again, nor would he amass more than six strikeouts in a game. In fact, in his last two starts of the season, Hernandez didn’t even make it out of the third inning.

What happened?

We have a tiny bit of data from FanGraphs on his pitches. In both 2002 and 2004, we see that low 90s fastball he had before the injury was down to an average off 88 mph in 2002 and 87 mph in 2004. Without that zip, he wasn’t missing bats. He still relied on his curveball, but was worse than league average at missing bats with it.

He also suffered from lapses in control. He only found the strike zone on 45 percent of his pitches in 2004. Whether that was because he couldn’t command his pitches or a fear of those pitches getting hit hard, who can tell.

To compare him to another soft tossing lefty, Dallas Keuchel also didn’t throw hard. Keuchel routinely found the zone less than Hernandez too, averaging about 40 percent in the zone pitches during his most successful seasons.

However, Keuchel also threw first pitch strikes about 10 percent more often than Hernandez did in 2004, and still managed to miss bats at a 9-10 percent clip.

Maybe given time, Hernandez could have adjusted to his stuff and found a way to be successful. He never got the chance.

He hung around Houston’s minor league system for 2005 with an ERA over 5 at Triple-A. He started the 2006 season in Double-A Corpus Christi and got blasted in seven appearances before being released.

He threw in the Venezuelan Winter Leagues for a couple years before being signed by Tampa Bay, where former Houston executive Gerry Hunsicker had ended up.

Hernandez never did make it back to the majors, however. He continued pitching in the minors with various levels of success, playing at Double-A and Triple-A, in winter leagues and the Mexican League.

In fact, he was still playing in the 2017-18 winter league season, 16 years after his Astros debut.

What could have been?

It’s tough to think about injuries like this. A promising career, where the Gods reached down and turned his left arm into a thunderbolt. But, like a bolt of lightning, his arm flashed greatness and was gone before we knew it.

That blurb from BPro suggests Hernandez had already dealt with arm issues. Was the decision to rehab his shoulder after the injury on the bases his? Did he play down the severity because he wanted to keep pitching, to keep showing the world how electric his arm could be?

For an undersized pitcher, you can understand the drive. This was his shot. He was going to play through pain, play through soreness, just to keep his shot at the big leagues. He had likely been discounted as a pitcher because he stood 5 foot, 11 inches, which wasn’t the ideal height for scouts.

Yet his devastating curve kept him in the game. Houston saw something in him, like they saw something in fellow less-than-ideal-height pitchers Roy Oswalt, Billy Wagner, Johan Santana, and Mike Hampton.

You know that curve is what gave him immediate success in the low minors. And the uptick in his fastball velocity likely gave him the success when he made the jump to higher levels.

But the one constant about pitchers is they get hurt. The human arm isn’t meant to throw a curve that bends like a tornado, nor is it meant to hurl a baseball faster than a car drives on the interstate.

Injuries are a part of the game. But they still hurt your heart. Maybe Carlos Hernandez’s arm would have failed him eventually anyway. Maybe we should be glad we got to see his brilliance on display even once.

After all, we don’t get to decide how long the sun shines on the brightest of us. We should just appreciate the beauty of the moment while it’s here.