The Kiké Hernandez Era (And It Was An Era) Is Over

For a few weeks in the waning months of 2022, Enrique José Hernández González was the face of the Boston Red Sox. I will tell my grandchildren about this and they will not believe me.

Xander Bogaerts was gone. Chris Sale was hurt (not that that narrows down the timeframe). And there were reports that Rafael Devers and the team were “miles apart” during contract extension negotiations, leading to a prevailing sense that Carita would either be dealt for prospects before the season began, or that we’d all endure yet another funeral dirge of a season in which a beloved, homegrown star was poised to depart. Into this void stepped Kiké Hernandez.

It was Kiké who took the lead in recruiting free agent former teammates Kenley Jansen and Justin Turner to the Sox. It was Kiké whose tweets made the news. It was Kiké who served as the unofficial ambassador of the Red Sox during the Winter Classic at Fenway. He was everywhere, both online and in the flesh, serving as the voice and face of an organization in flux.

In a traditional sense, he was an awkward fit for the role. Sure, his performance in October 2021 (or the last four months of the 2021 season, really) was already approaching mythical status. And moreover, Kiké’s gregarious personality and general comfort with fame (something that isn’t always easy to find in modern ballplayers) made him a natural in front of the camera. But the truth is that, for someone being presented as the face of one of the most iconic teams in sports, Kiké Hernandez just wasn’t good enough. He was a career utility guy, someone who, offensively, had been worse than league-average more often than he’d been better. His 2021 production was such an obvious outlier that there was nowhere for him to go but down. We probably should have seen this coming.

But in another sense, Kiké was actually the perfect representation of this era of Red Sox baseball. We are currently in year four of a post-Mookie project in which the focus of the front office has not been on building a World Series contender, but on rebuilding the farm system and shedding long-term payroll liabilities. In the meantime, the MLB roster has been stocked with a parade of short-term, undervalued veterans who, if everything were to go right, would hopefully lead the Sox to the postseason. This strategy hasn’t always worked (see, e.g., Corey Kluber). But, for one year at least, it did work with Kiké. And it was glorious.

Kiké Hernandez was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers today for minor league relievers Nick Robertson and Justin Hagenman. It isn’t yet clear what this deal means for the long-term direction of the franchise, or even just the short-term direction that Chaim Bloom intends to take leading up to the trade deadline. It could mean nothing more than that Bloom saw an opportunity to trade the single worst player in baseball in fWAR for something of value and had to jump on it.

But this post-Mookie bridge project isn’t supposed to last forever. The idea is that it will eventually give way to the next era of Red Sox baseball, when the Sox no longer need to rely on out-of-nowhere five-WAR seasons from career utility guys just to secure a playoff spot on the final day of the regular season. Maybe this trade is a signal that this next era is finally — almost — here.