Dodgers Stuff Postseason Hero Enrique Hernández Back Onto Their Roster

For much of last summer, it looked as though Enrique Hernández had reached the end of the line with the Dodgers. For as popular as the team’s longtime superutilityman had been, his production was dreadful, and it seemed only a matter of time before he got caught in a numbers game as the team ran out of roster spots. Fortunately for both him and the Dodgers, a visit to the eye doctor helped, his production improved dramatically, and he had some huge moments in October while helping the Dodgers win the World Series. On Sunday afternoon, just before the Super Bowl, Hernández himself announced that he was returning to the fold.

Walking through the open door pic.twitter.com/hsd4IOpva6

— Enrique Hernández (@kikehndez) February 9, 2025

The statement refers to general manager Brandon Gomes’ words at the Dodgers’ recent FanFest. “Obviously, we’ll never close the door to Kiké,” said Gomes of the free agent, who has played a vital part on all four of the Dodgers’ World Series teams during the Dave Roberts era.

“Everybody’s waiting for that news to pop up, to see Kiké back as a Dodger,” Teoscar Hernández said at the FanFest. “I want Kiké to be back.”

The Athletic confirmed that the 33-year-old Hernández has signed a one-year deal, pending a physical. No terms have been reported at this writing, and the move won’t become official until the team opens a spot on the 40-man roster by placing someone on the 60-day injured list, which could happen as soon as Tuesday, coinciding with their official pitchers and catchers report date. Last year, the first time Hernández re-signed with the Dodgers, he made $4 million. At the time, he was coming off a brutal -1.1 WAR season, though he had at least improved from a 59 wRC+ and -1.3 WAR with the Red Sox to a 95 wRC+ and 0.2 WAR with the Dodgers, who had reacquired him on July 25 for righties Nick Robertson and Justin Hagenman.

The arc of Hernández’s 2024 season was roughly similar to ’23 minus the change of address, in that he started slowly, hitting for a 59 wRC+ (.191/.258/.299) — again — in the first half. Just before the All-Star break, he acted on a tip from Martín Maldonado, his teammate on Puerto Rico’s 2023 World Baseball Classic team. “He told me that him and a couple of his teammates needed glasses, and they didn’t really know through the spring training test,” Hernández told the Los Angeles Times’ Jack Harris. A more thorough eye exam revealed that Hernández suffers from astigmatism in his right eye, blurring his vision and preventing him from picking up the spin of the baseball. After being fitted for glasses and adjusting to what he called a “weird” change in his depth perception, his performance soon improved. He hit .274/.307/.458 (112 wRC+) in the second half, trimming his strikeout rate from 21.1% to 17.8% along the way.

It all seems so simple! Yet not everything about Hernández’s turnaround lines up so neatly. For instance, he chased more pitches outside the zone in the second half (33%) than the first (27.5%), while his walk rate shrank from 8.5% to 5%. His Statcast numbers also did not uniformly improve; instead, he went from falling short of his expected numbers to outdoing them:

Where Hernández did see major improvement was when he pulled the ball, which he actually didn’t do quite as frequently as in the first half. But when he did, he got much better mileage:

By the time October came around, Hernández was hitting the ball even harder whether or not he was pulling it, which he did with a similar frequency (36.5%) as the regular season:

With the injuries to Freddie Freeman and Miguel Rojas, Hernández got much more playing time than expected during the postseason; he hit a robust .294/.357/.451 (129 wRC+) while emerging as a key catalyst and producing memorable moments in each round. In the second inning of the win-or-go-home Game 5 of the Division Series, he broke a scoreless tie with a towering 428-foot solo homer off the Padres’ Yu Darvish, the first of two runs the Dodgers scored while eking out a victory over their NL West rivals. He broke open Game 3 of the NLCS against the Mets with a two-run sixth-inning homer off Reed Garrett, doubling the lead from 2-0 to 4-0. In the fifth inning of the World Series opener against the Yankees, he tripled off Gerrit Cole — just the team’s second hit of the night — and scored the game’s first run moments later on Will Smith‘s sacrifice fly. In Game 5, with the Dodgers down 5-0 and hitless through the first four frames against Cole, he led off the fifth inning with a single, then scored the first of his team’s five runs in the frame when Cole failed to cover first on Mookie Betts’ grounder. With the Dodgers down 6-5 in the eighth, he hit another leadoff single, this one off Tommy Kahnle, and soon scored the tying run on Gavin Lux’s sacrifice fly. Two batters later, Tommy Edman scored what proved to be the decisive run on a Betts sac fly.

Hernández’s October résumé is one to behold. The owner of a modest .238/.308/.405 (93 wRC+) line for his career during the regular season, he’s up to .278/.353/.522 (134 wRC+) in 259 PA in the postseason, with 15 homers — tied with Babe Ruth for 20th all-time. Sure, his increased opportunities are a product of the expanded format, but a good number of the 19 players above him and Ruth in the rankings are Hall of Famers or will be some day; meanwhile, Hernández is the only player among the top 58 (10 or more postseason homers) never to make an All-Star team.

“I do a lot of visualization at night, the night before the games, and I try to put myself in every position, every situation that you can come up with during the game,” Hernández told reporters after his NLCS Game 3 homer. “I visualize myself having success over and over against their entire pitching staff and things like that… The fact that I’ve had a pretty good track record in October, I can’t help it but [have it] bring me confidence.”

“Kiké has the best mentality when it comes to playoffs, and I think everybody kinda feeds off his energy. I absolutely feed off of it,” said Lux at the time.

The Dodgers have valued Hernández’s versatility ever since president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman acquired him from the Marlins in December 2014. A surehanded defender who can do everything except catch, he made at least half a dozen starts at every infield position plus left and center field in 2024, plus two in right; he also pitched 4.1 innings of mop-up relief. During the postseason, he made multiple starts at second, third, and in center field, and his behind-the-scenes work meant something to the Dodgers as well, as Friedman told Dodgers Territory’s Alanna Rizzo on Monday:

“Obviously the impact he has made in October on field, it was obvious — off field, this past October may have been the most impressive displays of leadership I’ve ever seen. His connecting with different guys. Going out of his way on a number of different fronts was quite possibly the most impressive leadership I’ve ever seen.”

“A lot of times you have a need, you’re targeting a need, you have the player at the top of your list and then others. In this case, it was Kiké or nothing,” said Friedman regarding his filling a spot on the Dodgers’ overstuffed roster.

As to how he fits in, with the trade of Lux and the ticketing of Betts for shortstop and Edman for center field, Hernández is the leading candidate to carry at last the short half of a second base platoon with Hyeseong Kim, a lefty-swinging 26-year-old whom the team signed after he spent eight seasons with the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes. Righty Chris Taylor can also play second, but he’s coming of a dreadful .202/.298/.300 (74 wRC+) season that lacked the redemption arc of Hernández, to say nothing of the WAR gap between the two (-0.5 WAR versus 1.3). Hernández could also serve as a complement for lefty-swinging right fielder Michael Conforto, particularly if the latter’s 145 wRC+ against southpaws in 2024 proves fleeting. Taylor and righty Andy Pages could also fill that role, though the latter still has a minor league option remaining, as does Kim.

On that note, despite Hernández’s turnaround, his 2024 performance still has a couple of areas of concern. Though he’s long been hailed as a lefty-masher, he’s had to relinquish ownership of the now-retired Madison Bumgarner and thus has produced just a 90 wRC+ against southpaws over the past three seasons, compared to a 70 wRC+ against righties. He managed just a 90 wRC+ against lefties in 2024 as well, and while he did hit .291/.304/.527 (129 wRC+) against them after the break, that was in just 56 PA.

Second, Hernández hit just .162 and slugged .252 against four-seam fastballs against pitchers of either handedness in 2024; his .254 second-half xwOBA against them was one point lower than in the first half. Before and after getting glasses, he was particularly helpless against four-seamers in the upper third of the strike zone, managing an .049 wOBA and .202 xwOBA against them while whiffing on 32.1% of his swings; by comparison, he produced a .358 wOBA and .332 xwOBA with just a 17.6% whiff rate against such pitches in 2022–23 combined. His -13 run value on four-seamers was the fifth-lowest out of 255 hitters with at least 100 PA against such pitches. While he made up for it by beating up on sinkers, sliders, and changeups, he doesn’t face any of those pitches as often. Unless and until he closes that big hole in his swing, pitchers will continue exploiting it.

The Dodgers’ depth and positional flexibility gives Roberts a dizzying number of options when it comes to filling out his lineup, and on paper they could have easily made do without Hernández. Still, even in the face of obvious concerns, the team values his presence beyond the numbers enough that they’ll always try to find room for him.

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