2022 In Review: We Still Don’t Really Know How Good Kiké Hernandez Is

2022 In One Sentence

He was awful, then injured, then ok.

The Positives

Uhh, he was a pretty great Twitter and Instagram follow? Is that positive enough?

The Negatives

All of it, seriously. He had just 19 games all season in which he recorded two or more hits. His OPS had already peaked for year by April 16. He had a pool of blood in his abdomen that made it damn near impossible to run. It wasn’t a fun year!

Best Game Or Moment

2022 was a lost season for both Kiké Hernandez individual, and the Red Sox as a whole. But one of the great things about baseball is that, even in the waning weeks of an awful year, the game can still provide moments of joy.

On September 1, 2022, the Red Sox woke up having lost 9 of their last 13 games. They’d been stuck in last place for over a month. Rafael Devers was 0-21. The Rangers got to Rich Hill early that night and took a seemingly insurmountable 8-3 lead into the bottom of the 8th inning. But the Sox, led by the slumping Devers, clawed back over the next two innings, and it was Kiké Hernandez, who hadn’t even started the game, who finally tied it up in the 9th.

One Big Question

Kiké Hernandez almost certainly doesn’t think that 2021 was a fluke. On the contrary, he probably thinks the fluke was what happened between 2014 and 2020. He probably spent those seven seasons knowing that he could play everyday, knowing that he could hit, knowing that he was an All-Star — if only he’d get the chance to prove it. That’s generally how the brains of elite athletes work: they are steadfastly irrational in their own self-belief.

But the cold hard truth of it all is that it is almost guaranteed that Kiké Hernandez will never again be as good as he was from June through October of 2021. He put up an .825 OPS over the last four months of the 2021 season, only to follow that up with his legendary October performance: 5 homers in 11 games, 10 extra base hits, a .408 batting average and an .837 slug. For five months in 2021, Kiké Hernandez was a Hall-Of-Famer.

But, by definition, you can only have a career year once. So, in 2022, Kiké Hernandez was either going to outproduce his 2021 season and ascend to stardom at age 30, or he was going to take a step back. I don’t need to tell you which one happened.

Even before going down with a strained hip flexor and the subsequent hematoma that kept him off the field for two months, Hernandez’s performance absolutely plummeted in 2022. The .209/.273/.340 slash line he put up before the injury last season was his worst offensive output since he was a part-timer with the Dodgers in 2016. The .240/.317/.336 line he put up in 42 games after his return was only marginally better. Hernandez would probably say that he was still battling the effects of the injury in those 42 games, but here’s the thing, other than a notable dip in power, those stats aren’t all that far off from his career numbers.

But wait! Here’s where irrationally confident elite athlete Kiké Hernandez would say “shut up, nerd, 2021 was no fluke!” And he would possibly have a good argument. Because, for everything I said above about 2021 being his career year, it . . . maybe wasn’t. Over the course of the entire season, he was possibly even better in 2018. He hit more home runs in 2018 than he did in 2021 in over a 100 fewer plate appearances. On a rate basis, he walked more and struck out less. He put up 3.5 bWAR, despite the fact that he was taken out of over half the games he started before getting to the ninth inning.

So, the big question for Kiké Hernandez is: what is his true talent level?

Considering that he’s entering his age-31 season, it’s remarkable that we don’t have a completely clear answer to that question yet. He’s probably not as good as he was in 2018 and 2021, and probably not as bad as he was in 2022. Where he ultimately falls in between those two poles will have a major impact on how good — or bad — the 2023 Red Sox are.

2023 And Beyond

Given how bad Kiké’s injury was last year, I’m sure he’s just excited to start the season with a clean bill of health. Hopefully, he’ll get a chance to ease into the year and regain his form. The biggest thing standing in the way of that happening, however, is that he doesn’t yet know where he’s even going to play. The Red Sox still have a Xander-sized hole in their middle infield and, while the optimal Red Sox lineup has Hernandez in centerfield, barring a trade for a starting shortstop or second baseman, he can’t quite put his infielder’s glove away just yet.