“Homestand: Small Town Baseball
and the Fight for the Soul of America”
The author: Will Bardenwerper
The details: Doubleday, $30, 320 pages, released March 11, 2025; best available at the Penguin/Random House publishers website, the author’s website or BookShop.org
A review in 90 feet or less
Kiké Hernandez hustled to the bat rack in the Dodger Stadium third-base home dugout. He saw me standing there, observing. He pointed at my shirt and made the quick comment as he grabbed a new piece of wood to take back to the batting cage:
“Hey, JetHawks. I played there.”
“I remember,” I replied.
It was some 10 years ago. I was covering a Dodgers game for the LA Daily News. My blue short-sleeve shirt with a Lancaster JetHawks logo on the left side caught the eye of Hernandez, who at that point in his career was referred to as Enrique (read the game stories of that time). Then he became a playoff legend and his calling card was modified (along with a correct hyphen to avoid Spellcheck’s wrath).
At that point, the backup second baseman, shortstop, third baseman, left fielder, center fielder and right fielder had not yet posted a career pitching 9.64 ERA with an 0-1 record in five appearances.
That one season Hernandez spent in the Cal League (100 games, .275 average, .736 OPS, 104 hits, 25 doubles, 7 triples, 5 homers, 49 RBIs, 4 steals) was a celebratory one for Lancaster’s prized entry in 2012. The 20-year old prospect of the Houston Astros was on a roster with future MLB players George Springer, Delino DeShields Jr., Carlos Perez, Domingo Santana and Nick Tropeano, all eventually playing their ways out of the high Single-A ranks to various degrees.
When he came to the U.S. mainland as a 17 year old from Puerto Rico, Hernandez was acclimated in the Astros’ Gulf Coast Rookie League. Future stops would take him to the Tri-City Alley Cats in Troy, N.Y.; the Lexington Legends in Kentucky and the Corpus Christi Hooks in Texas. In 2015, the Oklahoma City RedHawks, the Dodgers’ Triple-A team, would be his last minor stop before launching into an MLB trajectory. The only other times he would sport a minor-league jersey were on rehab assignments – the Tulsa Drillers, the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, the Worcester Red Sox, the Portland (Maine) Sea Dogs.
Kiké got around. That’s life in the minors. You also become a community asset. As part of the Class of 2019 for the Lancaster JetHawks Hall of Fame, a key contributor to the team’s first Cal League pennant in 2012, he got a Rally Banana bobblehead to show for it as well.
Where is that Hall of Fame now? In our memories.
Continue reading “Day 10 of 2025 baseball book reviews: The small-town Muck(dog)raker”
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