Saturday Night Live’s Marcello Hernández’s Comedy Chops Are Matched Only by His Love of Baseball

Photographs: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

Baseball fans tuning into Saturday Night Live in late 2022 received an unlikely surprise: a sketch on the long-running show devoted to baseball. More specifically: a Weekend Update segment featuring new cast member Marcello Hernández, a frenetic young man absolutely overflowing with enthusiasm for the sport.

It is perhaps obvious that baseball is a rare SNL topic. So how, exactly, did this happen? “Lorne [Michaels] loves baseball,” Hernández explains over Zoom. “During my interview, he asked me if I had any stuff about baseball and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I have one bit about how the Dominican players are better than the American players.’ He giggled and then we never talked about it again. Then that week, Aaron Judge hit that record home run”—number 62, setting the American League record—“and the playoffs were about to start, and Lorne wanted a baseball thing on [Weekend] Update.”

The result was one of the more memorable SNL debuts in recent memory: an impassioned, physical bit about Latino baseball players. Hernández had honed the routine over and over again as part of his standup act, and it hit hard when he broke it out on live television. (Among his new fans: Mets outfielder Starling Marte, name-dropped in the bit, sent an appreciative DM.) It wasn’t always clear that the segment would be a home run, though. “I wrote it in an hour, on a Wednesday before table read,” Hernández explains. “It didn't go great at the table because it's not, like, a real sports crowd in there at SNL. It was just clutch that Lorne wanted a baseball thing and I had been doing that joke for years. It was one of my first jokes, and now I'm sick of doing it. I tried to do it last night. I started it, and I was like, ‘I can't. I've done this too much. I'm not going to shake my hips again.’”

Now, Hernández is collaborating with Major League Baseball on the league’s El Béisbol es Otra Cosa (Baseball is Something Else) campaign. He describes it as an homage to the way Latinos have positively affected the game, and a love song for the Latino baseball customs he’s long admired. “I think that it's cool to just show the traditions that we have and the ways that we do baseball a little bit differently,” he says. “It's almost like a religion for us.”

Like countless kids who trade baseball for the arts, Hernández was not exactly wowing people on the diamond. “I was really bad at baseball when I was little,” he admits. “I have severe ADD, and it was like, I'm in the outfield and the ball never gets here. So, I was doing a lot of cartwheels in the outfield. I also could never understand wearing pants in the sun. That was something that I couldn't wrap my head around at that age.” And though he found plenty of success in his chosen field of comedy, he never lost his love of baseball. Growing up in Miami, Hernández rooted for the Marlins in the days of contortionist pitcher Dontrelle Willis and Dominican outfielder Juan Encarnacion, and frequently attended games with his uncle Pepito, who he says would always try to race him in the parking lot.

With Cuban and Dominican heritage, the 26-year old took a liking to pretty much any and every Dominican baseball player of the 2000s. “I was just kind of like a little encyclopedia for Dominican baseball players when I was little,” he says. A huge part of his baseball education came from video games, where he would play franchise mode and try to construct teams exclusively out of his guys. “I would only draft Dominican players,” he laughs, before busting into the time-tested baseball-fan activity of Remembering Some Guys. “Obviously, Big Papi. Albert Pujols, of course. Third base, Adrián Beltré or Aramis Ramirez. Left field, Manny Ramirez. Center field, Willy Taveras. Right field, Vlad Guerrero. I know these Dominican players like the back of my hand. Alfonso Soriano, Luis Castillo, Miguel Tejada…I would throw Juan Pierre in there because he played for the Marlins, and then guys that I thought were Dominican that weren't. I thought Jimmy Rollins was Dominican forever.”

The San Diego Padres have a star on the field and a hypebeast off of it.

When he eventually accepted that baseball was not his path to stardom, Hernández turned to soccer, where he was much more successful, and later to comedy. That’s how he got on SNL’s radar, and in his very first episode, a cosmic set of sports circumstances allowed him to flex his baseball acumen.

Getting to work with MLB was a true dream for Hernández, who also participated in the Celebrity Softball Game and Home Run Derby last year in Seattle. He’s the kind of guy with many and varied opinions about the sport: on baseball history (“If there were some Dominicans back in the Babe Ruth days, it would've been a different league”), steroids (“I think steroids are good for you, bro. I mean, it makes you stronger. Isn't that good? You can lift more stuff”), and even the Dominican team Leones del Escogido, where the seeds of his performative streak were planted.

“When I was like, I think 10 or 11, my cousin took me to an Escogido game and he was… Dude, I don't even know how, but he was friends with the girls that were the dancers on top of the dugout,” Hernández begins. “We're hanging out with the girls and next thing I know, they're like, ‘Do you guys want to dance with us?’ And we're like, ‘Hell yeah.’ Me and my cousin on top of the dugout in the middle of an Escogido game, dancing. They put us on TV! People start calling my dad. Put channel seven on, put channel seven on. He's like, ‘What the fuck?’ Puts on channel seven and his little American son is dancing on the dugout of an Escogido game with the girls, like shaking ass.”

That little kid is now an official partner of Major League Baseball, and he’s been able to meet many of the Dominican stars who are currently lighting it up, like Juan Soto, Julio Rodríguez, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. And when you get up close and personal, he explains, you start learning more about the sensory details that separate the All-Stars from the chumps. “All these guys just look so dope—and they smell good, bro,” Hernández marvels. “Last time I went to see Soto in San Diego, he smelled like he dumped a bottle of cologne on his jersey.”

For now, with SNL on its annual summer break, Hernández is hanging in the Dominican Republic, where he’s doing standup and enjoying the perks of his newfound celebrity. But whether he’s getting advice from Gloria Estefan—“Always say yes to photos because it's nice that people are asking. One day they won't be asking and you'll reminisce on these days”—or reflecting on the fact that he, Bad Bunny, and writer Streeter Seidell created the first ever all-Spanish SNL sketch, his first love is never far from his mind.

“Baseball is so sick,” he says. “All the shit that they do is so dope.”

Originally Appeared on GQ

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