HERNANDEZ, FELIX  
 
Image of    Nickname:   N/A Position:   P
Home: Valencia, Carabobo, Venezuela Team:   MARINERS
Height: 6' 3" Bats:   R
Weight: 225 Throws:   R
DOB: 4/8/1986 Agent: Alan Nero
Birth City: Valencia, Venezuela Draft: 2002 - Mariners - Free agent - Out of Venezuela
Uniform #: 34  
 
YR LEA TEAM SAL(K) G IP H SO BB GS CG SHO SV W L OBA ERA
2003 NWL EVERETT   11 55 43 73 24 7 0 0 0 7 2   2.29
2003 MWL WISCONSIN   2 14 9 18 3 2 0 0 0 0 0   1.93
2004 CAL INLAND EMPIRE   16 92 85 114 26 15 0 0 0 9 3   2.74
2004 TL SAN ANTONIO   10 57 47 58 21 10 1 1 0 5 1   3.30
2005 PCL TACOMA   19 88 62 100 48 14 1 0 0 9 4   2.25
2005 AL MARINERS $316.00 12 84 61 77 23 12 0 0 0 4 4   2.67
2006 AL MARINERS $340.00 31 191 195 176 60 31 2 1 0 12 14 0.262 4.52
2007 AL MARINERS $420.00 30 190.1 209 165 53 30 1 1 0 14 7 0.281 3.92
2008 AL MARINERS $540.00 31 200.2 198 175 80 31 2 0 0 9 11 0.261 3.45
2009 AL MARINERS $3,800.00 34 238.2 200 217 71 34 2 1 0 19 5 0.227 2.49
2010 AL MARINERS $7,200.00 29 211.1 174 200 59 29 5 1 0 10 10 0.222 2.38
PERSONAL:

  • Hernandez grew up the youngest among a sister and two brothers, one of whom, Moises, is now a pitcher deep in the Braves organization. Their father, Felix, Sr., was a truck driver; their mother, Miriam, a homemaker. They were middle class, unlike Mariano Rivera and Sammy Sosa, who grew up fashioning gloves from milk cartons. "My father always gave to me," Felix, Jr. recalls.

    His walls, meanwhile, were adorned with posters of fellow Venezuelan hurler Freddy Garcia, then of the Mariners. Felix, to this day, wears the same #34 on his back that Garcia wore from 1998 to midway through the 2004 season with the Mariners.

    "I was like 11 years old when I first saw him pitch," said Felix of his fellow Venezuelan. "He threw hard and I really liked the way he pitched. I wanted to be like that. He would go after hitters."

Hernandez developed into the same kind of pitcher.

"When I signed with the Mariners, they called me 'Little Freddy,'" Felix said. "They said I even looked like him."

  • Felix's mother had to crack down on his boyhood penchant for shooting hoops at the playground during school hours and told him his best hope for the future was honing his baseball talent.

    "He was terrible as a child," she says with a laugh. "He skipped school all the time to play basketball. I was the one who told him, 'You're going to play baseball because it's what I want you to do.' When he was 13, he was really small. I thought he'd never grow. Then after 14 or 15, he got really big."

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    Hernandez admits he'd never really envisioned himself as a baseball player. He played shortstop in Little League and could hit the ball farther than most of the other children. But it was on the basketball court where he really excelled.

    "I wanted to make it to the NBA," he says. "I was real good, too, man. Really good. I had the moves."

    But his arm began attracting plenty of baseball attention. By 12, he was pitching on squads traveling outside the city. A couple of years later, at a tournament in Maracaibo, he was spotted by a Mariners bird-dog scout named Luis Fuenmayor.

    		 "I went on a weight-training program, and by the time I was 15, I could throw 94," Hernandez says.

  • Felix played on an amateur team named Flor Amarillo (the Yellow Flowers), which played games only on Thursdays. With his 16th birthday (and therefore signing eligibility) approaching during the spring of 2002, he began being pursued by the Yankees, Braves, Rockies and Mariners.

    Seattle won out with a $710,000 bonus offer in large part because of the trust that scouts Bob Engle and Pedro Avila (a Venezuelan himself) had built with the young pitcher. Avila first discovered Hernandez when he was 14 years old.

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    "They gave me the most attention," Hernandez says of Mariners officials. "They came almost every day. They treated me well. They're good people. I don't like the Yankees. I never did. I don't know why. The Yankees are too big. It's not the people. It's the team."
    (Alan Schwarz-Baseball America-3/24/05).

  • Felix will have to keep an eye on his weight, but his work ethic is good, so that should never really be a problem.

  • Hernandez has the words "FELIX EL CARTELUA," roughly translated "Felix the Badass" embroidered on his glove.

    UNLIMITED POTENTIAL
  • In 2003, at the age of 17, Hernandez dominated the Northwest League. He led the league in wins, ERA, and strikeouts for most of the summer, before allowing four earned runs over five innings in his final start before a promotion to low Class A Wisconsin. "He more or less dominated every time he took the mound," Tri-City manager Ron Gideon said.

  • Before 2004 spring training, Baseball America rated Hernandez as the #1 prospect in the Mariners organization.

    It’s easy to get overexcited about young pitchers, but Hernandez has the legitimate potential to become the best pitcher ever developed by the Mariners. (Baseball America -3/04)

    Before 2005 spring training, the magazine again had Felix ranked a the best prospect in the Seattle system. They also said, Hernandez "has become unquestionably the best pitching prospect in baseball."

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  • In 2004, at age 18, Hernandez turned in the most dominating season for a player that age since Dwight Gooden was Baseball America's Minor League Player of the Year in 1983. He allowed more than three earned runs in just four of his 25 starts, and he was named the top prospect in both the high Class A California and Double-A Texas leagues, just as he had been in the short-season Northwest League in 2003. He was the youngest player in both circuits, just as he had been in the NWL.

    Hernandez also worked a perfect inning at the Futures Game, highlighted by an effortless strikeout of the Mets’ David Wright.

  • On August 4, 2005, at age 19, Hernandez made his Major League debut  at Detroit's Comerica Park. He became the youngest pitcher to start his first Major League game since Britt Burns took the mound for the White Sox in 1978.

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  • In 2005, Felix was named the Pacific Coast League Rookie of the Year and Pitcher of the Year.

  • Felix and his wife, Mariella, have a daughter, Mia, that was born late in the 2005 season. And on February 27, 2009, their second child, and first son, Abraham Jeremy, was born.

    Mariella says she first saw Felix when he was 14 years old, pitching in a neighborhood ballpark. She would watch him from a window in her ramshackle home.

    "When I was playing on the field, I'd see her in her house," Hernandez says.

    Mariella eventually left the house and made her way down to the ballpark.

    "I went to the stands to watch him," she says. "He was very shy. He didn't talk to anybody. I was the one who asked him out on our first date."

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    They had that date on a nearby beach and have been together ever since. She gave birth to their daughter right around the time Hernandez was first called up by the Mariners late in the 2005 season.

    During the off-season, the three of them lived with Felix's parents in Valencia, Venezuela. His father bought the family's two-level home in 1983 with his savings as a truck driver and—despite some remodeling—little about it has changed. Life here isn't much different for Hernandez now than it was in his early teens. The simplicity of it all would shock many fans in the United States.

    While he drives a Ford Explorer, it's not all that uncommon in this oil-rich country, where public transit is woefully inefficient and gasoline costs about 12 cents a gallon. Hernandez bought his own two-story home about a half-hour's drive away, and Mariella, Mia, and Felix moved into it in December 2006.
    (Geoff Baker-Seattle Times-11/26/06)
  • Hernandez has an interesting favorite meal: beans and spaghetti. He also likes arepas—pastry shells filled with meat and vegetables.

  • Felix has two dogs, a pit bull terrier named "Oriole" and a feisty, fist-sized shitsu dubbed "King."

  • Every time Hernandez crosses the first- or third-base line to start an inning, he does a little sideways hop over the chalk line.

    And why does he do this?

    "Superstition," he said. "I started doing it a long time ago, in the first professional game I ever pitched. I pitched a good game and have been doing it ever since."

    The superstition goes a bit further. At the end of each inning, Hernandez walks to the Mariners' dugout, making sure not to step on the chalk line. He just steps over it.

    TRANSACTION REPORT

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  • 2002: The Mariners signed Felix as a free agent, out of Venezuela.

  • January 19, 2009: Hernandez and the Mariners agreed to a one-year, $3.8 million contract, avoiding salary arbitration.

  • January 19, 2010: Felix and the Mariners agreed on a 5-year, $78 million contract.
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    PITCHING:

    • Felix is to pitching what Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez were to hitting. That's how Seattle Mariners fans and all of baseball looks at this superstar in the making, arriving on the MLB scene in August 2005—at age 19.

    • Hernandez has a superb right arm. His FASTBALL is 91-98 mph. It will reach 100 mph on ocasion. And he has an extrememly good, hard, knee-buckling power CURVEBALL, a hard 88-90 mph SLIDER that can reach as high as 91 mph and a good heavy CHANGEUP that he can locate with precision.

      He will throw any of  these three pitches at any time in the count. Except the slider, which is probably his best pitch. The Mariners weren't letting Felix throw it in the interest of his health—and he doesn't even need it to be the most dominating pitcher in his league.
  • Felix overmatches hitters. He has good command of his stuff, working the ball all over the zone very effectively. He has good pitching knowledge and mound presence. Though he has overpowering heat, Hernandez realizes the value a changeup has in throwing hitter's timing off, so he has a great feel for the pitching craft.

    Hernandez is different than most power pitchers because he gets lots and lots of groundballs. This results in that he rarely gives up home runs.

  • Hernandez is effective low in the strike zone or with hard heat up in the zone. He reminds people of a young Doc Gooden, displaying superb stuff coming from a well-controlled big body.

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  • Felix has sound mechanics and his arm action is incredibly good. Plus, he is very under control with his delivery, keeping his head still. And he has the self-assurance that equals his stuff.

  • When Felix started for the Mariners on Opening Day in 2007, he became the fourth pitcher since 1900 to start and win on Opening Day before turning 21 years old. The others are Chief Bender in 1905, Bob Feller in 1939, and Fernando Valenzuela in 1981.

    Stats, Inc. notes that Hernandez is the seventh pitcher younger than 21 to start on Opening Day in the past 88 years. Others are Catfish Hunter (KC A's, 1966); Dwight Gooden (Mets, 1985); Valenzuela; Feller; Josh Billings (Tigers, 1928); and Gary Nolan (Reds, 1969).

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  • Hernandez will move to the elite class of Major League starting pitchers when he understands the importance of throwing inside more and puts hitters away sooner. During the 2007 season, he gave up a lot of hits (15 or 16) on 0-and-2 pitches—far too many with his kind of stuff. Getting pushed away from the plate now and then would make hitting against Hernandez far less comfortable.

    Felix hit only two batters in 2007. Consider that Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens averaged hitting around 7 hitters per year.

  • In 2009, Hernandez matured, no longer taking an outing off beetween brilliant starts. The on-field sulking and mini-tantrums are also gone. Missing a strike call or allowing a home run no longer derails a start.

    In 2009, Felix tied for the most wins in the American League, 19, with C.C. Sabathia (Yankees) and Justin Verlander (Tigers).

    BREAKDOWN VS. LEFTIES AND RIGHTIES

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  • In 2006, the righty throwing Hernandez allowed lefthanded hitters a .281 average with 18 home runs in 388 at-bats, while holding righthanded hitters to a .241 average with 5 home runs in 357 at-bats.

    In 2007, Felix allowed a .299 average with 14 home runs in 375 at-bats vs. lefthanded hitters, while holding righthanded batters to a .262 average with 6 home runs in 370 at-bats.

    In 2008, lefthanded hitters had a .275 average with 13 home runs in 429 at-bats of Hernandez. Righthanded batters had only a .242 average with 4 homers in 330 at-bats.

    In 2009, Felix held lefthanded hitters to a .228 average with 8 homers in 469 at-bats. Righthanded batters managed only a .226 average and 7 home runs in 412 at-bats.

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  • As of the start of the 2010 season, Hernandez had a career record of 58-41 with a 3.45 ERA, having allowed 863 hits and 80 home runs in 905 innings.

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    FIELDING:

    • Felix does a good job at holding runners on base, and a great job fielding his position.

    • On June 23, 2008, Hernandez hit the first grand slam home run by an American League pitcher since Cleveland's Steve Dunning vs. Oakland on May 11, 1971. And Felix's "granny" was off of none other than Johan Santana of the Mets, in Shea Stadium.

      But it wasn't the first grand slam by a pitcher—technically, a former pitcher—who happened to be at Shea Stadium on Monday, wearing a Mariners uniform. That would be Hernandez's pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre, who hit a grand slam in the very same city on July 20, 1965, when he pitched for the Yankees.

      Oh, one thing about Stottlemyre's: It was an inside-the-park salami.

    		 "I remember a lot about it," Stottlemyre said. "It was in the [Yankee] stadium, the ball was hit to left-center field, against Boston, a real hot day in July. The pitcher was Bill Monbouquette. Those things you don't forget."

    Hernandez is not likely to forget what he termed his first homer since Little League. What did he think when he hit it?

    "That's four RBIs. That's all," he said. "I was happy. I said, 'We scored four runs, good. That's all I need, four runs.' I closed my eyes anyway. My approach? Just swing." (Larry Stone-Seattle Times-6/24/08)

     
     
    CAREER INJURY REPORT:

    • March 24, 2006: Hernandez suffered with shin spints in his right leg and was held back from a couple of spring starts. He started the season on the D.L. while getting his arm in shape.

    • He has had bursitis.

    • April 17–May 15, 2007: Felix went on the D.L. with a muscle strain inside his right elbow and forearm.

    • June 24–July 11, 2008: Hernandez was on the D.L. with a leg injury which happened in New York when Carlos Beltran slid into him while he was covering home on a wild pitch. It was termed a mild sprain.
     
     
    Last Updated 9/4/2010. All contents © 2000 by Player Profiles. All rights reserved.