Success Quote by Keith Hernandez

The line lands like a shrug turned accusation: of course they "can't" lose. Keith Hernandez, a player who lived inside baseball's daily grind, is naming the invisible hand that fans swear they don't see and players quietly catalog. On the surface, it's a throwaway comment about two aces, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, whose dominance in their prime made losses feel like statistical errors. Underneath, it reads as an indictment of how the sport manufactures inevitability.

Hernandez's choice of "can't" is the tell. It's not "won't" or "probably won't". "Can't" implies an ecosystem with stakes beyond the box score: bullpen management, media narrative, postseason positioning, even officiating and luck bending toward the stars. It captures a late-90s/early-2000s baseball reality when certain pitchers were marketed as events, not just starters. A Johnson-Schilling game didn't merely decide a standings column; it reaffirmed a hierarchy the league and its audiences had invested in. Baseball loves the romance of randomness, but it sells the comfort of order.

The subtext is also about pressure. For teams built around elite arms, a loss on their day feels like a breach of contract, a waste of an expensive certainty. Hernandez isn't claiming a conspiracy so much as diagnosing a collective mindset: when the ace takes the mound, everyone behaves as if the story already has an ending. That's the sly power of the quote: it exposes how quickly "competition" becomes "script" when greatness is involved.