Au Revoir, Kiké

This is the time in the season when there are tons of questions: who’s buying, who’s selling, who’s going where. I’d been planning a feature about the key questions the Red Sox need to answer in these next few days and weeks, but what do you know — as is also common this time of year — solutions are starting to present themselves.

We have the answer now to my top question. Really, it was a demand: we needed to do something about Kiké Hernández. And now we have.

I really hate to harp on a player who’s struggling, especially one on my own team. There’s an ick factor there that I’ll probably never get used to, but I also believe in being real.

I cringed when I saw Kiké in the lineup post-2021. It’s been said many times that he was a particular “favorite” of Alex Cora’s. Cora could always find a way to get Kiké in the lineup, but he put him in the lineup too many times, and in too many ways. Kiké may have thought shortstop was his best position (like, what?!), but he simply shouldn’t have been there, and we have proof of this from the number of errors he’s racked up — a major-league leading 15 at any position, period.

Photo by Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images

That’s embarrassing for him, and he’ll bear the brunt of those decisions because his stats are his stats, but Cora bears responsibility for running him out there so frequently. Chaim Bloom bears even more responsibility for not formulating a plan to effectively deal with Trevor Story’s injury, or properly create the infield depth our team needs.

As Cora said in June:

“The roster is the roster.” - Alex Cora

I haven’t mentioned Kiké’s offensive performance, which has also been, let’s say, sub-par (.222 BA this year, with a career-low .599 OBPS). Although honestly, I find myself much more upset about his defensive shortcomings. His errors were frequent and often egregious (a disturbing trend with Cora at the helm; this isn’t a Kiké-only problem) and I have no patience for that.

So Kiké is gone, before I even had a chance to plead my case. This was the right move. I’ve been so impatient that I personally might have DFA’ed him a while back, but I think Bloom was right to get some minor-league pitching in return. Because, why not?

It sounds like the right move for Kiké too, since he’s happy to be back in LA and he hit 2-4 in his first game back. He and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts have talked and it sounds like Kiké has accepted that he’s better off as a platoon player. So we (and by that, I pointedly mean Cora and especially Bloom) did him no favors. Maybe he can regain some respectability on the field and mentally and emotionally recover from what must have been a hellishly frustrating time for him.

Kiké, you have always had my favorite nickname, and I wish you well. Good luck.