Usually the most you can hope for from the second catcher on a fantasy baseball team is that he won't hurt you too much. Hernandez hadn't shown much power before 1998, but for the Zingrods in 1998 he hit more home runs by June than his last three seasons combined. That would seem to qualify as "not hurting too much".

Hernandez was traded on 7/12/1998 to the Hollywood Dragons (now the Germantown Dragons) along with Jeff Montgomery for Bernie Williams and Jay Bell. Todd Hundley's return from the DL made Hernandez expendable, but it still says something good about Hernandez' talent when you look at the top-tier players the Zingrods got in return.

The esteem in which the Zingrods regard Hernandez is reflected in the fact that later in the 1998 season, the Dragons released him and the Zingrods picked him back up. Once again, however, Hernandez became trade bait, and he was included in a package traded to the Mudville Nine in the 1998-1999 offseason for Chuck Knoblauch.