Red Sox trade Enrique Hernandez to his former team

The Dodgers and Red Sox have agreed to a trade that’ll send infielder/outfielder Enrique Hernandez back to Los Angeles, report Ken Rosenthal and Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic. Hernandez spent the 2015-20 seasons with the Dodgers.

Hernandez, 31, is struggling through one of the worst seasons of his career, batting just .222/.279/.320 in 323 plate appearances. The offseason injury of Trevor Story—which required elbow surgery—prompted the Sox to move Hernandez from center field to shortstop. The results weren’t pretty, with Hernandez returning to a position he’d barely played since 2018 and posting some of the lowest defensive grades of any player at any position (-6 Defensive Runs Saved, -13 Outs Above Average in just 484 innings).

The extent to which the defensive struggles also impacted Hernandez’s mindset at the plate can’t be known, but his production hasn’t dipped to this level since the 2016 season. He’s hitting .260 against left-handed pitching—albeit with a lowly .314 OBP and .338 slugging percentage—but has been a nonfactor against right-handed pitching (.209/.266/.314).

Struggles on both sides of the ball notwithstanding, Hernandez is a career .259/.346/.465 hitter against southpaws. The Dodgers will hope that a return to the team he called home for the majority of his career can bring about a turnaround at the plate and/or on the field. Los Angeles has hit well against lefties as a team, but that’s generally been in spite of poor production from a cast of outfielders that has looked lost against southpaws. All of David Peralta, Trayce Thompson and Jason Heyward have struggled in that regard. James Outman is getting on base at a .366 pace against lefties but not hitting for power and striking out at a 34% clip. Chris Taylor has gotten on base at a lowly .268 clip but at least hit lefties for power.

There’s no guarantee that Hernandez will improve the team’s overall production against southpaws, but he’s a low-cost roll of the dice as a bench player who’s had success in just this type of limited role before—with this very team, no less. Given that the Dodgers have been cycling through journeymen like Yonny Hernandez and Jake Marisnick on the bench, there’s some sense in seeking some lower-cost stability. Hernandez figures to be a boon in the clubhouse at the very least, and any big early hits following the swap will clearly be well-received by a fanbase with which he was popular during his last tenure. There’s minimal risk in displacing Hernandez or whoever the roster casualty may prove to be, though the Dodger faithful will surely be hoping this trade is merely a footnote among a larger slate of deadline transactions rather than a focal point of the front office’s approach to upgrading the roster.

For the Red Sox, with Story nearing a return, they’ll subtract Hernandez from their glut of middle-infield and outfield options. Jarren Duran’s emergence in center field put a serious dent in Hernandez’s role with the team—particularly with Masataka Yoshida and Alex Verdugo locked into the corners. Yu Chang is a more versatile infield defender, meanwhile, and the Sox apparently prefer to continue giving the more controllable Christian Arroyo opportunities over Hernandez—a pending free agent playing on a one-year, $10M contract extension he signed last winter.

Per Roster Resource, the Dodgers had a $228M payroll and $245M luxury-tax bill prior to acquiring Hernandez, who’s still owed about $3.66M of that $10M salary. Even if they were to pick up the full freight of the remaining salary on the deal, Hernandez wouldn’t put Boston anywhere near the third tier of luxury-tax penalization, which begins at $273M and is the point at which teams see their top pick in the following year’s draft pushed back by 10 spots. As a third-time luxury tax offender in the midst of the first penalty bracket, the Dodgers would pay a 50% dollar-for-dollar tax on all overages. As such, Hernandez’s remaining $3.66M actually would amount to about $5.48M in terms of total expenditure—if there is no cash changing hands in the deal.