Orlando Hernandez

Some guys get called up from Triple-A. Orlando Hernandez got called up from a raft in the Caribbean. Less than six months after risking his life to leave Cuba, he was on a mound at Yankee Stadium pitching for the New York Yankees. Less than a year and a half after that, he was the ALCS MVP. This isn't a normal baseball story. It never was.

The Escape

El Duque's baseball life in Cuba ended before it should have. His half-brother Livan Hernandez -- also a pitcher, also brilliant -- defected from the Cuban national team in 1995. Cuban officials, worried Orlando would try the same thing, banned him from organized baseball for life. Just like that. One of the best pitchers on the island, done, because of who his brother was.

So on December 26, 1997, he went anyway.

He left from a coastal town east of Havana on a small boat -- some accounts call it a sailboat, some a raft, all of them agree it was crowded -- with his girlfriend Noris Bosch and five others, running at night to dodge Cuban patrol boats. They got stranded on a deserted cay in the Bahamas for roughly three days before anyone found them. The U.S. government granted him humanitarian parole within about 24 hours of the request going through, which mattered enormously: it let him sign as an international free agent instead of entering the draft. The Yankees signed him March 23, 1998, for four years and $6.6 million.

(Sit with that for a second. A guy who'd been sleeping on a rock in the Bahamas three months earlier was drawing up a multi-year contract with a major league team. Baseball can be an absurd sport.)

The Debut Nobody Planned

He wasn't even supposed to be up yet. David Cone got bitten by his mother's dog and needed to skip a start (yes, really, that's the actual reason -- one of the great random-transaction footnotes in franchise history), so the Yankees called up El Duque instead. June 3, 1998, Yankee Stadium, Tampa Bay Devil Rays. He struck out the first batter he faced, retired 11 of the first 13, gave up a solo shot to Fred McGriff, and left with seven innings, one earned run, and seven strikeouts in a 3-1 win.

Not bad for a guy making his first-ever big league start with most of the baseball world watching to see if the story was even real.

Then came the windup. That leg kick -- knee coming up almost to his chin, cap pulled low, eyes locked on the hitter over his glove -- became one of the signature images of the dynasty. Kids all over the tri-state area tried to copy it in Little League and none of them could. Brian Cashman later said El Duque "just had this presence about him like he was Michael Jordan." That's not a small comparison for a GM to make about a guy who threw a funky changeup for a living, and it wasn't hyperbole. He carried himself like the biggest games were exactly where he wanted to be.

October Belonged to Him

He made his first postseason start in Game 4 of the 1998 ALCS against Cleveland with the Yankees down two games to one, and threw seven shutout innings to even the series. That was the beginning of an absurd run: 8-0 to open his career in the playoffs, spanning the entire 1998-2000 three-peat, before he ever lost.

In the 1998 World Series he took Game 2 against San Diego -- seven innings, one run, seven strikeouts, part of a rotation where David Wells and Pettitte also won their starts in the sweep (Cone's Game 3 ended in a no-decision, with Ramiro Mendoza picking up the win in relief). Three different Yankees starters with wins in a four-game sweep. In 1999 he was even better: 3-0 with a 1.20 ERA across the whole postseason, capped by a Game 5 ALCS clincher at Fenway where he threw seven innings, allowed one run, struck out nine, and beat Boston 6-1 -- Jeter led off the game with a homer and El Duque didn't need anything else. He won ALCS MVP for that series and it wasn't particularly close.

The streak finally ended in Game 3 of the 2000 World Series against the Mets. He struck out 12 -- a Yankees World Series record that still stands -- over 7.1 innings and still lost, 4-2, when Benny Agbayani and Bubba Trammell got to him late. Twelve strikeouts and a loss. That's how weird his October track record was: even the rare bad night included a franchise record.

Across his Yankees career, the numbers land at 9-3 with a 2.65 ERA in 17 postseason games. Nobody on that roster -- not Jeter, not Mo, not anybody -- had a better winning percentage in October than the guy who arrived on a raft. (The math on that is almost freakin' rude to the rest of the rotation, honestly.)

The Age Nobody Could Pin Down

Here's the detail that never got fully resolved. When El Duque signed with the Yankees, his listed birthdate was October 11, 1969, making him a 28-year-old rookie sensation in 1998. Then, in 1999, court documents from his divorce filed in Havana surfaced showing a birth year of 1965 -- not 1969. His passport and his old Cuban baseball card reportedly lined up with the earlier date too. If that's accurate, he wasn't 28 when he debuted. He was closer to 33.

He never fully confirmed it either way on the record, and neither the Yankees nor MLB ever formally corrected it. So take your pick: the official story or the paper trail. Either way, the man went out and dominated October baseball at an age nobody -- including possibly him -- was totally sure of.

The Trade, the Return, and the Collapse

The Yankees moved on from him on January 15, 2003, in a three-team deal -- El Duque went to the White Sox, who flipped him to Montreal the same day for Bartolo Colon. He never threw a pitch for the Expos. Rotator cuff surgery wiped out his entire 2003 season. The Yankees, evidently unwilling to let go completely, brought him back on a one-year deal in March 2004.

That comeback season ended with him starting Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS against Boston at Fenway -- the game where Dave Roberts stole second off Rivera in the ninth and the Red Sox eventually walked it off in extras, launching the only 3-0 postseason comeback in baseball history. It's a strange footnote for a guy defined by never losing in October, watching from the dugout as the dynasty's other side of the ledger finally got written.

He left as a free agent after 2004 and kept pitching for years -- the White Sox, Arizona, the Mets -- picking up a fourth World Series ring with Chicago in 2005 before his final MLB game came in 2007. But nothing matched those first three Octobers in pinstripes. Nothing was going to.

Every part of it sounds made up. The forced ban from his own sport, the raft, the disputed birthdate, the eight straight playoff wins to start a career, the twelve strikeouts in a losing effort that still stands as a franchise record. It wasn't made up. It just happened to a guy who defected from Cuba on a boat and somehow made October baseball look easy anyway.