'Always in the middle of everything': Kiké Hernández eager to lead in both clubhouse and lineup

More recently, the Red Sox dedicated their Twitter feed to profiling the 31-year-old.“Kiké,” Turner said of his former Dodgers and now-Red Sox teammate, “is always in the middle of everything.”Get 108 StitchesA newsletter about everything baseball from the Globe’s Red Sox reporters, delivered weekdays during the season and weekly offseason.It is a position Hernández intentionally assumed this winter, once Bogaerts — who’d been working out with Hernández at EXOS in Arizona — left for the Padres.“Losing Xander, we’re losing a big, big boy in the clubhouse,” said Hernández. “I understand that a lot more responsibility falls on my shoulders.”Hernández welcomes the chance to assume a larger clubhouse role, a status not foreign to him.In the winter of 2020-21, when Sox manager Alex Cora recruited Hernández, he offered not only an opportunity but an aspiration. He wanted Hernández not to be “just” a role player known chiefly for his ability to play a bunch of positions and his role as what Cora described as “the Rally Banana guy,” a title drawing from antics inspired by the fruit in 2015.The Sox believed Hernández had an opportunity to flourish, on and off the field. By the second half of the 2021 season, he
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