MLB playoffs 2021 – Inside Boston Red Sox center fielder Enrique Hernandez’s historic October stretch

HOUSTON — When he was 13 years old, little Enrique Hernandez, always undersized and underappreciated, found himself glued to the television every night in October. “I never missed a playoff game,” he said, and that year in particular, 2004, had him rapt. For a kid growing up in Puerto Rico, baseball heroes abounded: Carlos Delgado, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada. At that moment, though, nobody was better than Carlos Beltran.

To see Beltran in the 2004 postseason was to see a painter rendering his masterwork. His potential blossomed, his talent radiated and his star glimmered. When he made an out, it was news. He carried the Houston Astros to the cusp of the World Series.

Seventeen years later, Hernandez — no longer undersized, now known as Kiké and finally appreciated — is turning in the sort of performance that he always believed existed inside of him. He believed it over the first seven years of his career when others didn’t, believed it when he landed with the Boston Red Sox as a free agent in February and believed it as they’ve ridden him, like the Astros did Beltran, to the verge of something historic.

Hernandez continued his epic streak on Saturday with another home run in the Red Sox’s 9-5 victory over the Astros in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series. It was his fifth homer in seven games this postseason, during which he has gone 16-for-32 with a .500/.514/1.094 line, the best seven-game stretch to start a playoff run since Beltran’s .448/.529/1.138 with six home runs. Hernandez has set records for the first seven games for the most total bases (35, beating Beltran’s 33) and extra-base hits (nine), tying Hideki Matsui’s record hit total.

And best of all, he won the approval of perhaps the most hard-to-please teammate in his career. Chase Utley, the six-time All-Star second baseman with whom…